American Snooty

Oye. Been out of it a while, you may let out a collective sigh of releif. Several things have contributed to this - one of the mostest reason being the return of A.E, one of my three favorite homegirls and the only one who currently resides in the country. Which is very, very nice. We're talking ice cream, movie nights, and taking a piss out of all that is male and vile. Aight- Me, taking a piss out of all that is male and vile, because A.E is currently involved with one of these beings. Which is actually quite nice.

And there goes another night shift weekend.

During which I have learnt that I have a serious dislike for students - the only people who, if recently bereaved, would probably start waving their yellow cards in the faces of the funeral directors. "Me student looong time. Five dollah off, five dollah off!".

Now, see, I've been a student, I know where they're coming from. 6500 - about 650 euros is not a whole lot of an allowance when you have a Stockholm landlord that swipes 50% and a transport system that wants 10% of this sum. But here's a tip, right - I print tickets. My job description clearly states: "ye shall be, no more, no less, than a ticket seller. Occasionally ye may dance in your booth." Meaning that I can't single handedly change a working system. Meaning that I don't want to change a working system. Meaning that every time someone comes and asks me if students have a discount on 30 crown (like 2 cents) ticket, I have a burning urge that spreads through my abdomen and pierces my puny little heart and makes me want to say- "Oh, scum of the earth, are we? That will be Fiiiiive Million dollars for sanitation alone.."

Course, there is the occasional student who understands that if you don't have the right card/ aren't travelling to a destination with discounted tickets/ give me the evil (student) eye then you're going to have to pay the same price as the old and underpriveleged, the families with eight little children (all in possession of big doleful eyes the size of thrift-shop hams), the decrepid and the ones who suffer from halistosis but insist on bending their head in such a way that their mouths are in level with the slot. Instead they smile and dish out the money, understanding that there is a system to follow. Each time one of these comes to me, I feel like leaving my booth and marrying them, regardless colour, gender, and socially unaccepted hairdos.

And then there are the aged Americans, who come - always in couples - stay a year or so and leave, still beleiving that Swedes are only capable of those three special little words when it comes to English. "I am Ing-ah!". These two U.S seniors trot up to the booth.

"Two to Y, please. And we are seniors. "

"Right, that'll be x amount of money, please." - pushing the ticket through the slot.
(yes, I know you're supposed to wait for the money, but I'm an ass)

"Seniors."

"Yes."

(wife, two meters away)
"Did you tell her we're seniors?"

Man repeats- "We are seniors. Old People"
He takes off his cap to demonstrate his balding head. I've just never appreciated people demonstrating their bald heads. His wife approaches the window and tries to improve their chances of being understood by pointing to herself and repeating "Old" as well.

"Well that's just lovely. X crowns please." (Me stupid looong time)

Even as they walked away, not quite sure of what had just happened, they looked dismayed and convinced that they had been swindled by yet another Inga Ignoramus.

Speaking of people not quite getting the message, a third-cousin of mine died a few weeks back. Since my family lives near the funeral home where my cousin was cremated, they decided to have some sort of reception at our home after the service - food and drinks and all that. My father therefore extended an invitation to the nearest and dearest of the deceased, some five-six people. Unfortunately, the message got scrambled somewhere along the line, and suddenly sixty people find themselves at our house.

Mum has to run out and get paper cups and paper plates, dad has to make food for ten last for six times as many. I'm proud to say that my father is a respected man in our community, (one of the reasons I moved), most people adressing him as Doctor and such. Now people are speaking of him as Jesus, which is interesting. The whole five loaves and two trout parallell, for you unbeleivers who just might want to start beleiving just about now. All gifts of food and wealth can be sent through me, of course. Discreet brown envelopes, people. Discrete brown envelopes.

[Afternote- plans of forming a gang fell through, Dan and I could not agree on gang colours and have now decided to war against each other]

Night Shifts and Satan.

Nightshift is hell, no question about it, or rather has been hell, but Nevermore, quothe the Creep. Why is this? I'm glad you asked.

Dan has become something of a lucky charm for me. A few weeks ago, I realized ( quite by accident,) that each time I massaged Dan on his scalp while he made chirpy prophecies about the coming morning, things had a tendency of working out. Now I'm not sure how many others have taken up rubbing an Asshole before bedtime in hopes of better days, but so far, so good. Thursday has seen another day of minor disasters averted.

I've also come to realise that I'm not too fond of one of the new employees. G usually comes in ten minutes before my shift is over. He turns off the cd player, which is usually playing a selection of carefully handpicked tracks, and switches on Golden Hits instead. Golden Hits! It's enough to make your ears bleed, but not before they sprout bushy grey hairs and your varicose veins start bulging like there's no tommorow. Golden Hits play Chubby Checkers, The Beach Boys (but not the good ones) and some song named 'Delilah' over and over and over again.

This coupled with his apparant inability to say 'thank you' and 'please' and his impeccable sense of fashion have conviced me that he is indeed the Devil. Each time a customer has paid I half expect him to hiss "Yesss, you may get your change back, but ONLY IF YOU GIVE ME YOUR SOUUUUL!" Except considering the boogie-woogie playing in the background, I'm sure a couple of them would fish out an Ella Fitzgerald record before realizing exactly who they are dealing with.

Social relations - the sad blog.

So what happens is that on some days, you get a whole lot of short-lived but interesting conversations going on. People invite you to their countries, ask you to throw caution to the wind and join them in Barbuda or wherever they're heading off too. And it's nice, in a controlled way, because you know you can't leave, the customers know it as well. Half the things people say to you is said simply because they're on their way someplace and have got those last minute balls that sprout five minutes before closing-time on your average Stockholm dance floor.

People say these things because they know that they are never coming back.
People say other things because they know where to come back.

I on the other hand, don't have much of a choice in the matter, which is both scary and both comforting. Because there I am, in a sea of motion and movement and planet trekking travellers. The one thing that remains the same. The sad thing is that I also have that one smile that remains the same. And this is the smile that people trade their hastily scribbled telephone numbers for. I get a couple of those a month, and it's nice and all - it's validation, after all, but it's also depressing because when you offer them your generic customer-oriented smile, it's not much different than the bills and slips of paper that are slipped through my slot. It's a product. If I was unhappy about being seen as a machine a while back, something I've unfortunately gotten used to and come to accept, it's even more disheartening to be seen as a product - something put on display. And these scraps of paper, the backs of receipts with numbers on them, as bids.

I don't call these numbers, and no, I'm not planning to.
What's even more of a downer is that after a while, you come to see all sorts of relations in terms of services provided and services exchanged. Freindships evolve into facts and figures, machinery I'm not sure I want to be a part of.

What is it about this grey zone between autumn and spring?

AIR

Has come out with a new album "Talkie- Walkie" that is well, it leaves you speechless.

There is music you want to make love listening to, definately, but this is music you want to make love to.

It's odd, it's so much beautiful that you want to cry from frustration, because there it is flowing out of your speakers, but just beyond your physical touch. Blowblowblowblowblowblow. It's not right.

Air's Walkie Talkie isn't any 'album of the year', it's the album of a lifetime.

Oh Scrungie, Where Art thou?

Vile is the thing that devours scrungies while you're not looking. And here yet another reason not to clean - half your wardrobe, half your important papers, and all of your scrungies fly to the land of milk cartons backs.

[Have you seen this blouse?]

The only scrungie spared is a flourescent orange creation that lights up your head like it's Christmas in Hell. Got this one for free from my aunt - or rather my 10 year old cousin. Aunt comes back with this thing, giggling her silly little head off which is always a reason to grab your skirts and run like a girlboy -

"Do you know what V said? She said, 'you can give this to Creep, it's too ugly for me'."

I had no good comeback. "I am rubber and you are glue whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you" is too much of a mouthful. It would have also technically made me have to give back the scrungie while saying it. Swallowed my pride, lit up my head. My policy is that if you can't verbally vanquish someone with three words or less then you've no right to open your mouth.

"I love You" is the common solution for the time-efficient man.

But I digress and will now do this again. Fact : Children say the darndest things, but parents who regurgitate these darndest things to everyone often fail to relay the cuteness of it, making the kid sound more like Damien from all consecutive Omen movies and the parent look rather dopey. Now despite my obvious perfection, even I have, in my youth, been guilty of letting toads leap by the dozens out of my mouth. See now, I was raised on a diet of Swinglish in an English speaking country - meaning I mixed languages, and still do. Four year old me therefore presented certain problems for my mother. The Swedish word for 'spot' is 'prick', and there miiight have been a couple of occasions when I pointed at people's facial scars and yelled "PRICK! PRICK!". Much to the amusement of none except my mother when her spotty mother in law hobbled over to visit us.

[ Generic Scrungie no. 5, come home, all is forgiven.]

I promise I would laugh whole-heartedly if a few scrungies would jump out of nowhere right now pointing and commenting my spots. Man cannot live on bread and water and flourescent-orange scrungies alone. Even if I knew where they were, I probably couldn't find them, I'm half blind anyway. Not blind in the way that I'm the cane toting kind of girl, though a cane is always pleasant on any given day, because you can wave it. And such. And maybe even pretend that you are the twirler in a marching band, like my uncle who spent five years in the military, only to come out proud owner of a stick with pink stripes, with which to lead his fearful army of tuba players.

"Behold the mighty Twirler, thou. KNAVE!"

"You're threatening me with a candy cane?"

"Tis NOT a candy cane! Tis a stick of Music! And Death! But mostly Music (anddeath!) "

"I will not bow to a grocery item! Here! Look! A gumdrop that's been lying in my pocket for a few weeks. Now that's something scary. Lint and all. Quite looks like a small hamster."

"Allright. can we at least play you a little song then and be on our way?"

"Carry On."

On a good day, I could have smelt them out. But now that I've cleaned my room, disinfected it with icky apple-blossom cherry-pie something, I'm stripped of my carefully developed super skill of smelling my way to whatever I'm looking for. I can no longer tell paper from plastic and thank the Lord each day that I'm not a grocery-boy. Instead the geek in me runs around my new room, mind shreiking "Control+F! Control+F!", my body generally bouncing into everything that I never thought was there. Like Dan.

Which brings me to another reason not to clean - Dan drops by my room a whole lot more often than I'm comfortable with. The reason for this being that it's it's now physically possible to enter without partially killing yourself or the small batallion you've handpicked to protect you from dangers untold. Having people in my room throws me off since it's so rare to find any sort of life form in my quarters. Course, the presence of people any where, anyday, throws me off. But when it comes to the bedroom, you don't know whether to seize the day, toss yourself over the new life-form and roll around on the bed or get out your magnifying glass and try to determine its species. Pull down its pants or poke a pin through it and mount it on a frame, neatly labelling it. "Buggus Maximus." as opposed to "Bugger Me, Maximus."

[Allright, I'm awful, I know. Generic Scrungie no. 5, come home, is all forgiven?]

Me: "Why are you here?"

Dan: "Just chilling."

Me: "Can't you chill in the living room?"

Boy leaves muttering something about there not being any king sized bed in the living room and that I should afford him the luxury of my bed since I went and wet his bed and he can't understand why he can't just lie down in mine, at least mine doesn't smell funny, whine whine whine. One of these days I'm going to get tired of all of this and tell him I love him. The common solution for the fed-up Creep.

All in all, the vacuum cleaner, dust wiper rag, and disinfectant have all three done their part in turning my room, my life, my world, into a strange strange place. These days I spend half my time staring at the creature that stares back at me from the now über-polished surfaces, fall on my knees and mumble "Take me to your leader." She never really answers. Just dances off into her world of paper scraps, mountains of clothes and trash, lint covered gumdrops and perfect bliss.

Afterword:
Found a rubberband, so I'm off to join the world of the living.
Wish me luck, pastry-faced polished surface girl.