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?

This is the error message I just got from Firefox when trying to go to the (correct) SAS airlines website:

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

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WOW! That is really, deeply intense.

oh what a wonderful way to spend your life, not needing anything, just walk around and sing (suburban kids with biblical names)

+ The Swedes just get it. They have echeveria, my most favorite succulent plants of all time, everywhere - tiny ones and big ones sold at the flower stores, in office windows that you can see from the street, etc. I didn't really discover echeveria until I moved to California since it is obviously not a New York type of species, but despite their prevalence in California when I started telling people that I want to have them at the wedding (along with a more lush type of flower, like white freesia) they acted like that was a little bit weird. But even though Sweden is probably an even less hospitable climate for succulents than New York, they get it! Gorgeous, elegant echeveria everywhere. One point for Stockholm.



+ I hate this phrase, but it truly fits here: the elephant in the room that is my life is the fact that I am in the process of applying to medical schools. In fact, 17 out of 22 secondary applications are complete and the remaining ones are schools I am really lackadaisical about (although I am going to finish them up by tomorrow at the latest). The ones I care most about have been in for weeks. People who submitted applications a bit earlier than me are starting to hear about interviews, and I am peeled to my email. I have writtens tens and tens of essays, and it has been a grueling process. I met a girl who recently graduated from medical school at the Karolinska Institute here in Stockholm, and the way it works in Sweden is that a percentage of students get in based simply on having top grades - no essays, no interviews, nothing - and if you don't have top grades there are some options for being admitted by going through a more elaborate process with interviews and things. I think both systems probably have their merits, and I certainly appreciate the fact that many US med schools make an honest effort to admit interesting, well-rounded people, not just those with 43S's, but the process has just been mind-numbing. And in a day or two, once the last ones are in, I will get to sit back and wait. I have literally no idea how many interviews I'll be offered. Will it be 5 or 15? Will Michigan and UCSF break my heart? In the end, am I actually going to have a choice between schools? Will I get into 1, or 3, or 8? The applications have been weighing over me and creating a constant underlying cloud of guilt and panic for the past however many months, basically it took over the former role of the MCAT, but aside from sporadic whimsical conversations with Jake (UCSF over Michigan? Harvard over UCLA? Madison over UC-San Diego? Columbia over NYU? and countless other permutations and combinations) and the hours when I am hunched over the keyboard writing yet another variation on the same topic, and especially since I am so far away in Sweden, I basically ignore the entire thing. When I submit secondaries, it's like throwing them into a black hole. But things are going to start happening. This is deeply exciting and tremendously unsettling. I'm prepared for some rejection, but I'm not sure how much I'll be able to take before starting to feel disheartened. Conversely, I feel like one positive response from one of my top choices will be enough to satisfy me. I sort of side-stepped the whole rejection/acceptance roller coaster during the college admissions process since I got in early to Columbia, and it feels weird to be waiting for judgments and pronouncements from 22 schools. Anyway, that's it for now since this is boring, it just occurred to me that it's a little strange that my coping mechanism appears to be ignoring everything (I guess it's healthier than obsessing).

+ When I was writing about echeveria I tried to look up the word for flower shop (blomsteraffär) in Swedish, and I came up with all sorts of good things. I already knew blomma (flower) and blommor (blossom), but I did not know:

Blomsterprakt ("floral splendour, profusion of flowers")
Blomsterspråk (literally language of flowers, but "flowery language")
Blomsterströ (to strew with flowers)
Blomsterur (flower clock. what is a flower clock?!)
Blomstervän (flower lover)
And, finally, blomsterflicka, or flower girl. It is a cool enough word to make me want to have a flower girl at the wedding even though I don't have any relatives or friends with kids who are the right age to be en blomsterflicka and will be able to "blomsterströ" the aisle at the bröllop (wedding). Nice pigeon Swedish, huh?

The magic of chronic disease prevention

+ I am obsessed with hemnet.se, where you can see the listings for all (or most of) the apartments and houses for sale in Sweden. When you're looking at apartments in Stockholm, they make the listings look remarkably homogenous - white, bright, light, airy, modern seem to be the golden standard. Despite the fact that real estate prices are at an all-time high in Sweden because of low interest rates and all sorts of political factors I don't understand, it is not actually that expensive to buy a nice apartment in Stockholm, especially compared to the ludicrous prices in New York and the Bay Area. Someday I am going to own either an apartment in Stockholm or, preferably, a big old farmhouse nearby. There was a NYT article a few weeks ago about a non-Swedish family who bought this big gorgeous house a few miles outside of Stockholm. I liked them. Also our neighbors in Berkeley who we idolize apparently have a friend (American) who lives on a farm south of Stockholm. Very exciting news to me.

+ Whenever I get sad, I just remind myself that the NBA season starts in less than two weeks. It would be difficult to adequately convey the amount of joy and rapture this brings to my heart. Plus, basketball is not respected as it should be. I am looking forward to many evenings of 1 am Knicks and Pistons games, and, most of all, many mornings of 4:30 am Warriors games, thanks to the glorious NBA League Pass internet feed.

Incidentally, there are some Swedish basketball leagues, but they appear to be a bit lackluster. It might be funny to go to one of the games. There is one Stockholm team called the Stockholmspolisen. Ok. The other one is called "08 Stockholm Human Rights." What kind of city names their professional men's basketball team "Human Rights"??? Stockholm. Incredible. The other Swedish team names aren't nearly as exciting: Solna Vikings, Norrköping Dolphins, Sundsvall Dragons. Jake discovered the Helsingborg Basket Pearls in a different league. There's also the Visby Ladies.

+ Sunrise and sunset times for the next few weeks:

Today: sunrise 7:42, sunset 5:22.
Saturday: sunrise 7:54, sunset 5:09.
And then, daylight savings!
Sunday: sunrise 6:56, sunset 4:06.
A month from today, sunrise will be at 7:58, and sunset will be at 3:10.

+ In a meeting recently someone made a joke about "postage stamps, photocopies, and lipoproteins." It was actually really funny, to the extent that jokes about grant applications and lipoproteins can be funny. There have been many more that I can't believe I didn't write down. One good line from the Helsinki conference was when the audience was rhetorically invited to a research center in Finland to "learn more about the magic of chronic disease prevention."

+ I'm starting to piece together names and approximate dates of the Swedish side of my family, and I've started looking through some of the Ellis Island immigration records. Steffen Olsen, Lillian Carlsson, Amanda Carlsson, Oskar Carlsson, Karin and George Wallstrom (who would visit my mom and her family on the Olsen farm in New Jersey but still lived in Sweden, so I guess if I can track down their grandchildren here those would be my mom's second cousins?)...

+ There was an interesting presentation at CHESS today by a British psychiatrist who does some collaboration with Ilona, about the association between school grades and functional psychotic disorders (schizophrenia and bipolar). The general theme, like most of the work here, is trying to examine whether there are social factors that contribute to higher risk, not just purely biomedical or neurodevelopmental. On a powerpoint slide showing a lifecourse view of psychosis development, he used an incredible picture of our wonderful president with a bizarre expression to demonstrate the final outcome of psychosis. It was pretty funny.

Rosendals Trädgård 2

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I bought the English version of the cookbook from the garden cafe there, which is also my new favorite place to eat in Stockholm. It is all fresh from the garden and organic and seasonal, and this cookbook is hands down the most beautiful cookbook I have ever seen. The author, Monika Ahlberg, asked various people to contribute text for the cookbook, and here is what Ingmar Bergman wrote:

"Färö 11.5.94 - Dear Monika! You rang and asked me to write something about wild strawberries. It will be both a short and a sad story. I have been allergic to wild strawberries all my life. Five wild strawberries are all right. But if I sin and eat seven, then I am afflicted by small, fiery red, madly itching rashes round my wrists and ankles. Sometimes - very rarely - I really indulge. In the woods behind my house there is a field. It is reddened with wild strawberries several times during the summer, big heavy fragrant wild forest-strawberries, it's like a miracle and I indulge without a thought for the consequences, which promptly make themselves known. Yes, it is terrible and typically Bergman-like but I console myself; the smell of freshly picked wild strawberries is like special music, it gives me a concrete conception of paradise, infinity - perfection. I don't really know how I can put this, it sounds far too grand, but I can't find any other words so it will have to be like this."

Rosendals Trädgård

Rosendals Trädgård on Djurgården is my new favorite place in all of Stockholm. Some of these pictures make it look dreary but it's not at all, it was just a very gray, fall day.

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Very white berries at Skansen.

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This is the type of photograph I could take all day in Sweden. These colors. I can't believe it. I must look crazy taking pictures of walls and corners of doorways and windows.

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I am in love with this strange hanging wreath mobile thing at my favorite little store in Stockholm, Vass, on Sveavägen. I want to buy everything they have, and judging by the candlesticks and votive holders and glass ornaments I have bought, I'm geting close. Sadly the wreath thing was not for sale, but it's very simple so I bought the little glass ornaments and I'm going to attempt to make my own.