OK, I have 13 minutes to write a post, Im at an internet cafe in Sazburg, Austria, and the y and z key have a switched location, its driving me crayz....HAHAHA

OK, here it comes, in bulleted form.
Stockholm.
Lund.
Dr. NO on a project screen @ Martins.
Transfer trains in Copenhagen (didnt stay on the way down)
Meet Jens, Norwiegen Coolie. (MALE)
Go to Hamburg.
Sleep at hostel.
Hamburg...
Erotic Art Musem.
Reeperbahn (Hamburg Prostition Area)...just for kicks.
Night train to Vienna (haha, that was a suprise to me too)
Sleep in same car as Hungarian Street Dancer.
Sleep bad for fear of being robbed.
Arrive in Vienna.
CULTURE...beautiful CULTURE.
Worlds 4th largest Art Museum..Rubens...El Greco...
Coffee Houses.. (the real deal)...inexplicable sweetness.
Gi-bungous Church.
Train to München
Sleep at the-tent.
Awesome tent.
Beer.
Beer.
Beer.
Beer.
Beer.
Artificial Surfing.
Worlds largest version of Liberty Science Center. (im a dork)
Three nights @ the tent.
Thomas pukes.
I meet an italian chicky... damn Im smooth. =)
Go to Salzburg.

Thats about it. Everything inbetween make up the blessed details that I am sure to share in the hallways all year long. Unfortunately we didnt make it to the Berlin Love Parade, due to the lack of beds in Berlin. doe. BUT, as you all know, I am my own love parade. =)

Peace out kids, In a few days I'll be skiing in Innsbruck.


OK, so i wrote the above in Salzburg, but it didnt post before my internet time ran out. Im in Montreux, Switzerland now. Things are simply more amazing then I have time to elaborate on. More later. Peace.

johan_in_europe@hotmail.com is where it's at for the next three weeks. Take note. This is the only email address I'll be checking, and I _might_ make some hasty updates to this website.

Who wants postcards? reply with your mailing address.

Adios for now. Tomorrow I am going to eat a huge breakfast, my last for a long while. I'm shuttering just at the thought of the utter shit that I'll be eating the next three weeks. It's gonna be grrrrreat.

In news of things past, my birthday was great, though Challe couldn't make it, which sucked. I made the best of the situation, and partied harty with da boyz. Unlike Tom, I was able to hold my birthday alchohol, despire the best of efforts of the entire party crew to get me puking. hehe, I rock. Things were whicked fun.

I got a bottle opener that says CAPTAIN on it from Carl. Gotta love Carl. It cost 2 dollars, but he works at the place where they sell him, so he gets a 40% discount. To fool me, he used the price tager and labeled it as 250 dollars and said it was real gold. He then "accidentally" left the price tag on. Good laugh.

I am going to be keeping a paper-and-pen journal while I'm out. Unfortunately for sharings sake, it's going to be in Swedish (I figured it was time I got used to writing in Swedish, and Thomas will be there to tell me how to spell stuff.) I will have to translate entries upon my return.

I'm bringing A People's History and Handmaid's Tale, both of which I plan on finishing. When that does happen, I'm gonna stop in at a book store and buy books in the order listed on the side of the website. Maybe I'll throw in Thoreau, too. We'll see. Literature, literature...

I leave you all with an old quote about tolerance that I was recently reminded about.

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
- Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945

When I was at the second hand store in Stockholm I saw a Tshirt that said FUCK FASCISM. It was an extra large. Not that I would have bought it anyways because I don't like the word fuck, too much shock value not enough message. O well.

OK, so it's my birthday, and I have a plan. Here it is:

There is something I've wanted to do for a long time. I want to go to the old barbershop next to Mount Everest ski skop in Hillsdale and I want to sit down with a tape recorder and ask the old man questions. For a very long time. That guy must know so much. I mean, he has a peep whole into society that nobody else has. He gets paid to talk to people. Oh, sure, he cuts their hair, but with the same forty people coming to him for surely the last 20 years, that's passive work, and his real job has been entertaining 40 lives. Talking to them, learning them. In a situation like that you can get a lot thinking done. It would be a crime against society to not find those thoughts out.

So I'm looking for candidates. I'm looking for characters. The requirement is that they are old and that they have served a position in public life, and that we can get an interview with them. My first thought here is a barber. how about the guy who sells tickets on trains? A hardware store owner. A deli owner. I want ex-hippies, I want communists, I want ex-communists, and I want to ask them why. I want 'nam vets, and maybe somebody who serves in a public office. I want immigrants, I want females. I want self-made men, I want people who were born rich and are now poor. I want that that have been poor all thier life. I want people who have starved as well as those who have never starved (that brings back memories of the book "the Giver"...remember, they told Jonas that he would never starve? ah..) I want a blind man to talk about racism. I want a draft dodger.

The beauty of it all is that they all exist in bergen county, and I'm gonna find them. Maybe that is culture? Right now my search of American culture feels like Pheadrus's search for quality.

I'm thinking about making this into a book, something along the lines of a written documentary, chronicling the lives of bergen county. There should be a range in the ages of people. Between 60 and 80. They can be retired, but the older they were when they retired the better. Of course, all the rules can be bent with good exception.

I also want these to be people who have never been interviewed in their lives. I want this to make thier day, so they're happy to tell thier tale. That enthusiasm is crucial.

I want suggestions. Who wants to co-author this? Maybe it should be a movie...Probobly both.

I want to capture the change.

I have a increasingly huge amoung of things to get done before I leave, and right now isn't the best time to do things like this, but I feel that if I go any more days without writing something I'm going to forget it all, and that would be a minor catastrophe.

Tuesday the tenth finished off with a superbly hilariously amazingly funny movie: "Torsk på Tallinn". Roughly translated it means "Failure in Tallinn." It's about a guy, Persey Nilegard, a constant entrepeneur with constantly abusive idea's. His previous movies have included a "Nile City.", about a radio station that rented space on the top floor of a gay firehouse. THey interviewed spazzes...like a guy who could only do one thing at a time...he would be drinking coffee, and the phone would ring, and he would fall to the ground as if he had a heart attack. There was really funny content, hard to convey in this form. Anyway, in "Torsk på Tallinn", his idea is to get together 15 guys who will pay $400 each to go over to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and find wives amoungst the desperate russian females. It's really funny. The guys are COMPLETE failures. Roland, for example, before the trip, buys an extra bed, and matching hooks for bathroom towels that say "his" and "hers". He tells about how he had a dance party once, yea that was how he blew out his left speaker...he had been confused over why nobody arrived, he had stuffed invitations in peoples mailbox's and found them on the street. Then there's another guy who is a septic tank guy. Whatever, it's too much to talk about here. It was a hilarious movie, I'm trying to find it with english subtitles.

Wednesday the 11th began with a trip out to my Aunt's place on an island further out for a visit through dinner. On the way home I read People's History, which is getting interesting as fuck. Zinn notes how it was the clash between capital and labor during the 1870's that inspired Marx to call America a prime territory for communism. Some of the stuff Zinn talks about is insane aristocractic rule and fascism. Now don't act to quickly, I'm not denouncing capitalism, but rather the American system, which has capitalist idea's, but fails in that inheritance still flows in families. If every individual with capital had reached his position by rising the ranks and not inheriting, there would be significantly less oppression and much more understanding. The problem lies in the fat-cat families that ran the factories of the day. It's incredible to read how much the working man was oppressed.

My conclusion here about inheritance being the problem is also in response to a debate I heard between I kid here that considers himself "punk" and preaches communist ideas and another kid. The "punk" has probably never even read Marx or Lennin, and definately has no clue about the true workings of capitalism. He just kept rambling out statements like "Fuck capitalism, you're retarded." and "Money? who needs money? It was invented to supress the proliteriat." What he doesn't understand is that capitalism is mearly that you keep what you earn, and your work should correspond to your worth. Not a bad idea. it's the example of America that sucks that fat one, just like Russia and Stalin showed the world a testicle-sandwitch and called it Marxism.

So I got home and went over to a friends house here on the island for a shindig. Challe was there. I'm going to leave it at this: Things went well. I don't wanna talk details here, that's just so tacky. Extrapolate whatever you want, I'll tell tales once I'm home, I just don't wanna discuss that here. But, uh, yea, Challe is a wonderful chick. We hung out basically the whole night, in both public and private environments. I drove her home with my boat at 3 in the morning.

The next day, Thursday, I did a bunch of scrubbing work on the sauna house, so now its painting time. When I was done with that it was Soccer time, me and the boys on the soccer field. That was a great time, and when it started to rain we went home to Fabian's (herafter Fabbe) house to watch the latest Swedish flick, "Tillsammans". It won the swedish oscar of sorts, and it's by the same guy who made "Fucking Amal" a few years ago, another great movie.

Tillsammans, which means together, was about a commune in the suburbs of Stockholm during the 70's. The motto of the movie is " Better to eat oatmeal together then lobster alone." There's a lot of truth in that. But yea, it was about a hippie commune. It was a truely excellent movie. Some of the characters: The movie opens with Gunnar listening to the radio, hearing the news. The radio annonces that Franco (spanish fascist ruler) was dead and he runs down into the kitched screaming and jumping "Franco is DEAD! Hurray! Franco is DEAD!" Everybody in the house (about 15) comes into the kitchen and starts celebrating, the pop a bottle of champagne. Then there's Erik (i think it was Erik). Erik has a son named Tet, after the Tet offensive. At the dinner table, Erik says "No Tet, no coca-cola, that's where we draw the line. Multi-national Capitalist Corporations that force themselves into markets have have no place in our house." Tet is funny as hell. A new kid has just arrived and is looking at Tet, and asks of him why he is wearing girls shoes. Tet says "these aren't girls shoes, they're gym shoes." The kid replies "for girls!" Tet (he's like 5 years old) replies "FUCKING FASCIST!" and runs outta the room. Tet's mother lives there too, she turned into a lesbian though. There's another guy in the house who's name esacpes me (maybe that was Erik, i dunno), who is the Marxist-Lenninist Revolutionary. He drives out late at night and stands next to the gaurds at the royal palace asking them what they think about a nation where the leader is born into a throne of wealth and seperate governing. he dances around the black line that you're not aloud to cross, asking the guy if he wants to come to the next meeting of the Marxist-Lenninist Revolutionaries. Great fucking movie.

There's commentary to it all from a 14 year old girl, quite bright. She brings up a Swedish childrens book called (translated) "All the Children in Noisytown." She notes how it's just like the house she lives in, where everyone just does exactly the opposite of whats the norm. In the book, the kids say how they love rain and hate sunshine, cus everyone loves sunshine. She notes how Tet's mom is a lesbian because it's the cool thing to be and alot of stuff. A really super-great movie. And one of the characters has a yellow tshirt with blue text that says "Made in Sweden." with a crown on it. Hottest t-shirt EVER. I will pay $30 for one, seriously, it was totally awesome. Do you KNOW how many chicks I could get with tha--oh yea, I have a lady, woops. =)

I fell asleep after the movie and went home at 5AM. Around 1 me, thomas, and my mom left for the city to go buy train tickets. After an hours waiting we found out you need passports to buy the ticket. Well, we didn't have em, so we said we'd go in on Saturday. Me and Thomas went to UFF, which is a secondhand store sorta like the Salvation Army here in Sweden, only they don't necissarilly sell excesively cheap clothes, but the money goes towards AIDS in Africa. I picked up two pairs of tight euro-style jeans so I could fit in while we're down on the continent. One pair of Levi's with some sexy wear and tear and another pair of Crocker, also nicely worn. Twenty bucks total. I was thouroughly amused how the Levi's that I am now wearing that cost me ten dollars could EASILY fetch a hundred at Nordstroms. They have that perfect worn look. They had Diesel Jeans for the same price, but not in my size. None the less, I was amused.

Last night was spent planning ish with Thomas. If we can't get a room in Berlin during the Love Parade we're going to do the following: Party until the morning and take a round trip to Zurich (7 hours x 2) for the sole purpose of sleeping. Ha! what a plan! The train rides are free! Woo-ha! Well yea, things are getting planned, things are looking hot.

Today, I went into the city to get the tickets and the international ticket windows were CLOSED. A wasted morning, but I got painting work done, so the day wasn't lost. Tonight is soccer and everything is looking grand. I'm looking forward to seeing Challe soon, and maybe I'll get a birthday present from her. ;) (that's a hint to the rest of you too, July 17th, hint, hint)

All that and I've decided that it's a good thing that China got the 2008 Olympics.

Due to popular demand, I made it possible to create new discussion threads, instead of just replying to my posts, entirely difference conversations can now take place. Everything happens at https://ugander.com/johan/talkback. Instructions are there and everything is working. Mail me if anything goes wrong. Be sure to read the how-to part on the page. woo-ha. It's also now part of the menu up in the top-right.

In news, things have toned down. I hace been undergoing Maoist thought reform as I scrape the paint off of and paint our sauna/changing room type little hut down by the water. It's tedious work, and it's in exchange for economical compensation for my trip, which I am going in on Thursday to buy tickets for. There has now been two straight days without a party (gasp!), and I've been wakeboarding instead. Man oh man do I love to wakeboard. I don't wanna seem like a hypocrite or anything like that, so I want to clarity that my preference to wakeboarding over waterskiing is not a sign of a preference toward snowboarding. Waterskiing just doesn't have the umf that skiing does. For me, skiing is about massive speed and re-cock-ulous drops and sick air. Water sports are more about carving and the jumping is almost made for wakeboarding. Wakeboarding is simply put better for water. On snow I seek not the same things. Right, I hope thats clear.

Well yea, I have begun to rock at wakeboarding. In the past 2 days...only the 2nd and 3rd day I've had time to wakeboard, and this is really the first year that I'm wakeboarding because last year I couldn't even turn toeside....So anyways, I've gone from a someone who could only make right hand turns to someone who can carve it up like a mother and I can almost clear the wake on jumps. I'm confident I'll make it the next time I go. Heck, I only started jumping yesterday, and already I can almost clear the wake. boo-ya. I've also manage to do ollie's, and I can turn 180 on the wake. Next step, after I clear the wake is to pull a 180. Shouldn't be tough. After that, tailgrab. So yea, in short, I'm kicking wakeboardings ass. Thomas is impressed, so I'm happy. Of course, he's trying 360's and backflips, so I'm quite at his level.

Yea, Thomas is a sick boarder. On snowboard, he can pull a backflip (rare), a frontflip (constantly), 540 (constantly), 360 grabs (constantly). And his grabs are sick as all hell. My opinion has been formulated from the video's I've seen of him. woo-ha. So yea, even though it's expen$ive, we're gonna take a day of skiing/snowboarding in the alps, simply because you can't go through the alps and NOT go skiing. hehe.

hot damn! johan strikes again!

My red plaid/puma outfit is now 2 for 2 on snagging female attention, and tonight it was with a truely wonderful girl...wow. Challe is her name, and she's just super. A strong personality and a gorgeous body makes for a amazing chick. Our encounter began by her establishing herself as the tenth person to remark on my likeness to the guy from Almost Famous (a movie I have yet to see). We then dwelled into American culture differneces, and such. Then, while another guy was asking her about someone, she started pulling up to me, to which i strengthened to the point that i shoo'ed the guy away. She was a truely remarkable hook-up, who left me dazzled. This is where things get complicated.

While we're going at it on the couch, both of us very engaged, someone comes up to her and says "are you marie's friend? come with me." She said "Wait here, just a minute..", flirtlingly, and bounced off. Well, at that point it was about 1:30. I went and took a piss (i had had a few beers) and went back to sit down. I gathered from others that she was talking to Marie and something 'important'. The party winded down around 1:45, and the host was kicking us all out and such, at which point I approached her.. asking her what was going on. She said it was about Marie and I needen't worry, and that we would see each other again, and she gave me a big hug. I said great, I'm looking forward to it, and we left. NOW...

While walking home with Thomas, I was filled in on a lot of things. Challe is apparantly the number 1 catch in town due to her charming personality and her great looks, and he complimented me. I was amused to hear this, but the next bit amused me more. The conflict with Marie had been over me.. apparently Marie wanted me, and Challe was her friend, and there was a conflict there. Now Marie is also very attractive...so this is...good news? I dunno. We're gonna have to wait and see.

Seriously, beyond the passionate embracing, she has a stunning personality. Thomas said she was one of those girls you just wanna marry (he admitted having a big crush on her, to which i said I was sorry, but he said no, of course, carry on, she wants you...) Yea, she's the fourth chick in six parties that has showed interest in me. Take note boys: they're seducing ME... No work on my part. However, She was the first hookup, and I really found her to be an awesome chick, everything felt so great, so we'll see what happens.

Here's one for you all:
why does the universe exist?

No, seriously, doesn't it seem like an extraordinary waste of energy? Just as water doesn't flow uphill, the universe doesn't just exist. What is the point of it all? A life may seem to have purpose, but on the grander scale what does this whole evolution thing come down to? All the billions of lives and the energy they have consumed for us to discoved our own genome, every discovery the sum of an extraordinary culmination of energy and life. All for what? I've got a strong feeling on the scale of everything, the laws of nature don't apply. Or something...

I've also tried considering the universe a 3-dimensional fractal, with every atom in the universe being it's own universe and such...thus explaining the immense complexity seen on the microscopic scale. Just one big fractal...

Ow, my head hurts.
This is all the result of a quite bothersome philosophasizing conversation I had with a girl at a friends house last night...She was one of this random philsophers, she would just spit out all those type of 'why?' questions...She would say something like 'rain? wow..so many syncronized droplets...and to think in the scale of things it's nothing.' haha, no she wasn't high. A question that I extrapolated from that that I found more interesting was this: For various purposes, man has long been vying for a perfect sphere, an asymtote of geometric perfection, yet splash your hand in water, you get perfect curvature. droplets. hmm.

The past two nights I've gotten home at 4:15 and 3:15..in the morning. Oof. Two nights ago, when I got home at 4:15, it was a very happinin' party, with a co-ed sauna to boot. Additionally, something hilarious happened on the way home last night. We had taken Andy's boat in the Vaxholm.

background: Andy's boat
Andy's boat is a peice of shit. It has a 10 horsepower motor that doesn't work in reverse. The actual boat is some kind of fibery plastic which you can feel the water running against it on the otherside by putting your hand on the bottom. Going over waves, the hull bulges. A real peice of shit. Additionally, when it became a requirement to place registration numbers on boats in Sweden a few years ago, in addition to the real registration number, RUT 66, his mom, a very fly person, put KUK 20 on the other side. KUK is swedish for cock. So his boat is named cock-20. Very amusing.

So we had pulled cock-20 up onto a sand near some private docks near where my friend emil lives, which was our destination. On the way home, when we get into the boat, an old man who was the night watch for the docks saw us. After looking at the shore and seeing that the boat had laid there, and noting our young hooligan-y looks, he began.

oldguy: "Excuse me, do you have a reserved spot on these docks?"
andy: "nope."
oldguy:"Did you find that boat on the shore over there?"
andy:"yea, it's mine."
oldguy:"Oh, so you're just borrowing it?"
andy:"The shore? yea."
oldguy:"Shouldn't you put it back?"
andy:"What? the shore? This is my boat."
oldguy:"Why was it here then?"
andy:"I was visiting a friend who lives up here and I put the boat there."
oldguy:"Where does the boat belong?"
andy:"Rindo, where I live."
oldguy:"That an awful long way, don't you think?"
andy:"nope." (it's 5 minutes away)
oldguy:"There's also a bicycle here, it looks like it was pulled out of the water, is that 'yours' too?"
andy:"Nope, it looks like it was pulled out of the water. There's a dead bird there, too." (there was.)
oldguy:"I see."
andy:"bye now."

That was hilarious.

Thomas, the friend who I'm tripping with, his parents get home tomorrow, so in the coming week we're gonna go buy our train passes. Right now our route looks to be:

Stockholm (SWE) - Lund (SWE) - Berlin (GER) - Dresden (GER) - Munich (GER) - Salzburg (AUST) - Innsbruck (AUST) - Bregenz (AUST) - Interlaken (SWZ) - Mnotreux (SWZ) - Genéve (SWZ) - Lyons (FRA) - Nice (FRA) - Paris (FRA) - Hamburg (GER) - Kopenhagen (DEN) - Stockholm (SWE)

15 cities in 3 weeks. Everything between Paris and Stockholm on the return trip is iffy, I haven't found that much to see up that coast, and I don't feel like going to amsterdamn this time around.. =P

Things like Dresden will just be a day trip from Berlin, while Berlin will be a weekend, Innsbruck will stretch out because we're gonna go hiking up into the austrian alps (cool and cheap). Paris will be a 3 day-er or so. Lund is just to sleep there (my brother's apartment.) Kopenhagen will probobly just be during a day and then we take the train over to Lund and sleep there. According to my calcualtions we should last 3 weeks on a budget of a 1000 USD (US Dollars). Yea, that's damn cheap. The france trip, which was 10 days, was 2200 USD. Ha! I could go 6 weeks on that budget! Damn school, no sense of cheapness. I have to do everything myself.

We should leave the 18th or so, aiming for the Berlin Love Parade...awww yeaaa.

I thought about my last post while trying to fall asleep last night and I composed the following:

Don't ever be envious; if you are envious it means that you admire a life that someone else holds as something that would bring you more happiness then you're current life. To be envious is to continue without a goal of improvement. Do not envy, learn.

Live like you will die tomorrow, learn like you will live forever. - Gandhi

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. - Gandhi

also - I post responses to the talkbacks, so check 'em out.

warning: this post contains nudity.

I am sitting here, It's quarter to 10, and as usual, the night is o so young. It's weird going out and saying good night to your mom on the way out. And it's not me being fashionably late, i'm just a late night person. Perhaps it's the serinity.

Well, let's recap the two days past. Yesterday I took the bus into Stockholm to the University, where I met with the fine madam who shares the responsability for the Test in Swedish for University-seeking Students (TISUS) that I failed to pass the writing portion off. She was a really cool person, and it was rather suprising that she should be a professor of nordic languages at the University...she was too, personable? kind? hmm.

Well we went over my essays and she showed me a lot of good pointers and such, and I think with a little brushing up I should be able to pass it the next time around. That was that. What really struck me was her opinion on my life's path as it stand right now, one that a value coming from her position. She recommended a sabaticle. I mean, c'mon! I'm gonna be 18, a fresh 18 years. I have the world at my doorstep.

"Make sure the thing you're living for is worth dying for."
- Charles Mayes

On midsummer I had a very deep conversation that was lubricated my a large amount of beer and such with a 19 year old islander that I've always seen in a positive light. He just got his High School diploma...well in Sweden, a high school diploma is a year more then an american HS, which adds up to a lot. well yea, it's not just a bum paper... so anyways, he is going to Bali for a year to be a scuba-diving instructor now in august, taking a year off, but I'm not sure that he's one to pursue the academic life. But yea, so he said this, and I replied 'wow...that's awesome'. His reply? Yea, I know, and it bothers me that everyone says that, because I say right back at them, 'why aren't you doing that?' That hit me...hard. If I think it's so great, why aren't I there? It's a living, right?

"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand."
- (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)

Ah, so Woody wants to play hardball, eh? I see things like the scuba-diving instructor position as only building towards the person that you can become. A few days later we had family friends over for coffee and tea and the husband of the pair, an officer in the navy, a very respectable one, and aged enough for me to take his words to heart, inserted the following into my mind upon my description of Deep Springs... he said that the technical stuff, the engineering degree, you can take that any time, and it's quite free of consequences on your outlook of life. Yes, it may buy you a bigger house, but the humanities are the windows on dwelling. (ok, well that was my extrapolation of his commentary).

So right now I'm thinking take a year's sabatical and study philosophy, either in college or in the himalayas. Hey, after a year I might not want to study Engineering Physics, who knows. Hey, I may never come back, who knows? Mmmm. I'm dangerous in that I enjoy picking the option that opens up the most new options, like Phadreus's search of truth, only he saught the absolute, while I try bitterly to escape it.

After dinner yesterday I went out and played soccer with the kids. Tons of fun..at around 11 we went back to my house and sauna'd and jumped in the water (a rotation) untill about 1 oclock...GOD did that feel grand. In a quite humurous series of events, while out on my dock cooling off after having taken a swim, a tourist boat came by and, while we were standing there being merry locals, turned on it's search light and pointed it at us. We were illuminated in the night for a bunch of tourists, surely accompannied by the text. "To your left you can observe a group of young swedish men taking a late night swim. Nudity, as you may know, is an accepted part of Swedish culture." Yea, we were naked. haha, you say, but what's the big deal? Exactly. Some of you are saying that's gross, but whatever. I can also imagine that some of you are thinking "damn, I missed an oportunity to see Johan naked." Well, tought. It's no big deal really. It's just what I carry around all day along.

Today me and Anders went waterskiing, and then Thomas (the kid i'm going training with), Andy and I wakeboarded. I am dead tired and my skin is giving off faint heat from a slight tanning.

In other news, something I had previously missed in SLC Punk, which I watched with Thomas and Andy two night ago, was Stevo's comment about Jenna (remember? red hair? carnivore?) , well yea, when he enters her house and she's there without her medication, Stevo says she's "looking a lot like Ophelia." Aha, a Hamlet reference. Dwelling further on this subject, Chris makes the fine note about how she's not a lithium barbie doll..lithium being the drug that makes her calm and all. Is there an analysis of a subliminal interpretation of hamlet to made here? I have to think it out, I have to get out now, too long indoors.

Here's a boatload of quotes that I've scooped together recently.

"In order for you to change the world, you must first become what you want the world to be."
- Gandhi

"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."
- Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes)

"Football is a mistake. It combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
- George Will

"It is better to die on your feet than to live a lifetime on your knees."
- Emiliano Zapata

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."
- Marcus Aurelius

"I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."
- Chief Justice Earl Warren

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
- Mike Godwin

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
- Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

"I found some numbers that support your strategic plan. I had to take the square root of a negative number to do it. The timeline is on this mobius strip."
- Dilbert

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
- Winston Churchill