i morgonen

It's 7 in the morning and I have already done many important things since waking up at 4:30, including drafting a fantasy basketball team, spraying my Loeffler Randall boots with water protection spray, and discovering the most amazing website with old pictures of Stockholm, called Stockholmskällan.

Here is a picture of the intersection a few hundred feet from my apartment in Kungsholmen, from 1896:



Put in a few more buildings and give all the women skinny jeans and boots, and I'd say it looks pretty much the same.

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Vurma doesn't open until 10 so in the meantime I'm drinking earl gray tea, watching the Swedish news (the leading stories today seem to be about "Argentina's Hillary Clinton" and," of course, football), and hoping it starts to get a bit brighter out.

After writing about my med school applications here last week, I went home that night and found an interview invitation from the University of Iowa - quite a good school, but, uh, not at the top of my list. Still, it's exciting to have my first interview scheduled, and maybe writing about it here was good luck and I'll hear from Michigan or UCSF today? Later today I need to call and make a reservation at the Heartland Inn in Coralville, near Iowa City, where there is some super discount for people interviewing at the med school. Which, by the way, is called the Carver College of Medicine. Roy A. and Lucille J., I think? That's sort of hard to beat, given my surgical ambitions. Plus, for Jake, their business school is called the Tippie School of Business. Pretty awesome.

Anyway, while I don't exactly dream of becoming a Hawkeye, people who know me well know my long-standing semi-inexplicable obsession with the state of Iowa. A big old farmhouse that we can renovate, with lots of animals running around in it doesn't sound half bad. And maybe I could do what I always wanted, and get an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop also. Although I forgot, Jake already has that degree covered, and if we are going to make any progressing in obtaining all the degrees in the world between the two of us, I should start considering a PhD - or perhaps an M.Div or a DSW?! Oh, and the point of mentioning Coralville is that Jake and I stayed at some motel in Coralville a few years ago on a cross-country drive, and it was high summer and the number of bugs and moths swarming around the fluorescent lights outside of the rooms was astounding, like a horror movie. It was so extreme that it was funny, we had to pull our things close to us, then open the door and rush inside and slam it as quickly as possible.

I'm going to Latvia on Saturday, for two nights. I found a cheap flight (not as cheap as some of the 1 kronor flights on Ryanair, but still pretty sweet) and a good rate at a beautiful hotel that is in an old mansion which is, apparently, "one of the most rare pergola example in historic architecture of the city." The building also " cherishes history of Pfab nobility and Benjamin wealth in its memories." Riga sounds beautiful, and Latvia is the homeland of one of my most favorite basketball players, Andris Biedrins, of "don't bleest me, biedrins" fame, not to mention my best friend from high school, Sonia. Riga had been on my list of one of the million places I want to go to, and incidentally the New York Times had one of their 36 hours in... articles about Riga last week.

And, finally, how is it that I have almost zero memory of half the books we read in Lit Hum and CC? It's like I'm a retiree who has decided to revisit the old classics in my golden years. At the top of my list are Democracy in America, and Leviathan. Maybe I should bring those to the Sturebadet to read on the elliptical instead of the US Weekly's that I force Jake to ship to me in Sweden?