SPICE UP MY LIFE!!!1

Hooray, the Spice Girls are coming back. Question is, does anyone remember the spice girls except for those two hit songs and that one movie that nobody saw unless they were eleven or high and mistook one salon for another (which resulted in a whole lot of proverbial "stealing candy from babies").

Well I for one remember the Spice girls. Not for their songs though, but for other random nonsense - something which seems to sum up the entire affair.


Scary Spice. Liked to wear horn-styled hair alot. Big mouth. Had a baby with Eddie Murphy. Had. sex. with. Eddie. Murphy. The man is funny, but when he laughs he sounds and looks like a horse. Every inch of his face looks like trying to run away from his teeth. The poor baby is going to inherit the Scary Spice scary, and the just plain SCARY.

Baby Spice. Lollipop-licking 40 year old in vagina-high babydoll dresses. I'm not sure how that reflects feminsim, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of paedophiles joined agreed with the "girls can do things tooo!" -power train.

Posh Spice: STEPFORD WIFE STEPFORD WIFE PUMPS OUT THREE BABIES STILL LOOKS LIKE A ROBOT. And since we're speaking movie references I'll just mention how much I'd rather see her in the Little Shop of Horrors. Either as Audrey Jr or as Dr. Farb. Either would be just as satisfying. Well, maybe not the second, there's nothing left of her as it is. It would take like a minute or something. What an anti-climax.

Sporty Spice. I don't remember which one this was. I remember the name because of the archetypes presented in this wonderful line-up: rebel, frigid, daddy's girl, ho. There must have been a sporty tomboy representative as well. Unless I am sadly mistaken and it was lawyer. Did I forget the lawyer? There's an optimist I me yet, I tell you. Brain Surgeon Spice, removes your tumor with pinkie nails alone, it's amazing.

Sexy Spice: I actually remember her doing a song after the Spice Girls parted - one where she danced around in hot little gym tights. During the time that she got into gym tights, her not being able to decide between being morbidly fat and a bone. I can't remember what the song was, but I get warm fuzzy feeling in my general crotch area when I think about the video. No I lie, I can't really remember the video either.

And my crotch just has the rot. It's that time of the month again, so forgive me if I'm not that nice. Or if instead of laughing my eyes go deer-in-headlight (venison-tomorrow!) wide when you say "Smell you later!"

When I want to feel special I screw Gunnar.

I was looking for a nice chicken recipe and decided to try tasteline.se, finding this, a "Caribbean curry-scented chicken stew". I have two problems with this.

One, that it's called curry-scented. Anything labeled "scented" is just another way of saying "well, we would make it a x-tasting dish, but you know, somebody might die of overexposure to this (awful) exotic ingredient." That's right. Might burn off your tongue. You might get AIDS.

My second issue with this is what - WHAT. What makes you think that tossing a piece of fruit into a dish makes it Caribbean. OH YOU'RE SO FUCKING CROSS-OVER AREN'T YOU. I ran this by my Caribbean best friend Donna who's well indoctrinated in all that is Caribbean. "Did you know that there's a Caribbean chicken dish with apricots?" I asked. She paused. I could hear her trying to digest this one, tiny seeds and all. "Apricots? No...we don't even have apricots here. They're imported. Why would we put them in a 'local' dish? AAAHAHAHAHA."

Moreover, why would one curry apricots? Vile little furry things. I'm sure that many Caribbean dishes use nasty fruits, I'm just saying that i don't toss an IKEA "Gunnar" armchair into my living room furniture group and call my home Little Stockholm. I throw it in and call in generic space filler.

I also have to mention these courses that have sprung up all around the country. African dance, belly-dancing, pretty much any "exotic" dance you can think of. Common for most of these however, is that they're usually led by some thirty-something year old lady from the darkest corner of Northern Sweden, who, after charter trip to Africa, got involved with a very handsome coconut of a man and having received well - let's just call it "essence", has suddenly developed a generous rash and a burning need to spread the jerky love-making style she experienced, now called "African dance".

Perhaps like this lovely dance instructor (from an Stockholm dance school left unmentioned), who seems to have absorbed more than the mandatory apricot-scented hip-twitch.



I mean, where you get that fro, ho?

I just don't understand anymore.

Duck a la sausâge

We went swimming today - Krister, my brother and I, seeing as how the water was above freezing temperature.

The one patch of beach by the lake was so packed with people that you couldn't see any sand. Just the sun bouncing off baby prams, foiled wrapped lunches and whole families' worth of white asses.

No matter. We found our own little patch of Swedish beach a.k.a grass and gravel and dove in from there. Some of us wore bathing suits, some of us insisted on doing the back stroke naked. It was the repeated mumbling of wanting to bathe naked that scared the family that had been there when we came to the other side of the lake; it was the great moon of a Krister leaping out of the water to catch a duck that prompted one of the younger members of the family now across the lake to scream. His "GAAAH NAKED NAKED!" was surprisingly coherent thanks to an otherwise calm lake. The mental scarring was for naught however, there were no ducks caught. Perhaps it was the heat of the moment, the army of endorphines set free with the loosening of underwear, or just something special about that day - but it seems to have slipped Krister's mind that despite their sedimentary lifestyle bobbing for small fish and the occasional shart, ducks can fly quite swimmingly. Ba-dam-bam!



Meanwhile, I gave my new bikini a test run. I haven't had a bikini for the past few years seeing as how I always manage to buy a top a size too small. And given that there's no returns on clothing that has been soiled by the gaping hole of nastiness that is breast, each summer has seen me and one or both of my nipples. My favorite being stepping out of the water to find that one has chosen to pop out over the bra, one under. Like an old married couple fighting over the best route to the early bird special. While looking like the cheap flaccid sausages they're struggling to get to.

This one seems to be holding up quite well though. In fact I look quite nice. The kind of nice where people don't ask you if you come with eggs and bacon too. The kind of nice where people don't band together to try to roll you back in the sea, or shoot you because it might be kinder (or because they feel a burning need to make soap NOW.)

The downside, I suppose, is that it makes me feel naked. I mean, basically a bikini is a bra and underwear with prettier patterns and a better drying rate. Because of the prettier patterns, no-one bats an eye that you're walking around flaunting your badly trimmed foliage. You can be as wet down there as you want, and yet nobody's trying to mount you. With a bathing suit you don't have that problem, since there's usually only two sorts of people that wear swimsuits these days. Everyone just automatically assumes that you're a very young grandmother of 10 or a 10 year old with Progeria. It's as if when you hit twenty the only socially accepted swim wear is a two-piece, and the only reasonable reward is rejection.

Maybe Krister had the right idea. When you're naked, you don't have any secrets or delusions of grandeur, especially not in fifteen-degree "warm" water. Nobody can claim that you're wearing too much or too little. They're just trying to avert their eyes from the gleam of the great wet white ass as it is bobbing around in hope of, and in wait for that one elusive duck.

Not quite the right sort of übermensch.

There's an unloading platform in the back of the warehouse where I work. It's used to lower particularly heavy and/or bulky packages to car-trunk level, to reduce carrying and lifting.

After unloading boxes, I've ride the platform back up while it's being raised by a button-pushing colleague on the inside. During this trip, I've occasionally pretended to be Superman. I think that it's just as funny every time, a viewing pleasure for the colleague who's raising me up - seeing as how I do it with the exact pinch of irony that befits fits the absurdity of Superman traveling at a speed of the platform's 2 meters per hour. After a couple of times of doing this, I was hit with the realization that my coworkers weren't really enjoying the situation as much as I was. It also dawned on me that Superman, while zooming up up and away, has a balled fist. As opposed to say, a flat-palmed heiling.

I wonder how many of those two or three customers looked into the rear view mirror hoping to catch a last glimpse of the friendly faces that had just delivered them their new garden furniture, only to see a Chinese girl closing the deal with a grin and an homage to a mass-murderer.

It's just really really really sad.

Hello? Is it me you're looking for?

As I was standing outside Pizza Hut waiting for Tess, a shadow falls on the patch of street beside me, hovering there for a while. It was the shadow of a short haired shorty. Coincidentally, Tess is a short haired shorty. I spun around with the widest grin on my face to find that the shadow belonged to a short haired short hobo. He stared at me for a while. I stared back, smile still stuck on my face. Then he left, walking off with a distinct look of discomfort on his face. This did nothing for my insecurities as the only this possibly worse than being hit up for cash by a hobo, is scaring one enough to not hit you up for cash.

Oooh fuck you June. And fuck me too, I guess.

June. June June June. JUNEYJUNEY JUNE. How I love thee.

Well no. What's interesting about June is that it in Sweden, it kicks off with groups of drunk young people traveling around in trucks decorated with bushes and announced by the booming of Eurotechno. Yes, this is exactly what happens. No, I don't know why.



The official explanation is that these youngsters are celebrating high school graduation. They've managed three years of high school studies and must now dance jerkily through town.

Every time I see these trucks with signs proclaiming that this or that class has now made it through the hurdle that is high school, I wish that I had a sign of my own, saying "You are all going to die." I feel the burning need to make these people aware of their mortality. As a newly hatched adult you still think you're going to live forever and that there's no way that New Kid on the Block will EVAH go out of style and step out of time, but alas.

In all honesty, I like the trucking, in a sense. I see it as an analogy, an appetizer. Because basically you're going round and round through town in the back of a truck - that pretty much sums up what's up ahead around the bend. You're not really going to be going anywhere. Life isn't going to be a clearcut as a degree, a job and a little army of yes-man self cleaning babies. It's shit. It's bills, mortgages, bad hangovers and the occasional bad case of the runs.

Thank God you'll have your all-inclusive charter trips to Ibittthhhha, Mallorca and Greece where you can join your fellow country men in flocking to the nearest Swedish restaurant because your know your kids can't handle that spicy Spanish food (and neither can you but nobody has to know. Maybe if you're feeling a bit adventurous later you and your significant other can try a hummus pita alongside those patent Swedish meatballs at Bosses Cocina. Unfortunately a decision you will regret later when you get the aforementioned runs. You will fail to see the correlation between the copious amount of cheap beer you have been "sipping" and the diarrhea, cursing hummus pita from this day on. The bread section at ICA will give you the shudders.)

But I digress. Life is never what you think it will be. And if you do, you might as well just keel over here and now. Imagine a life filled with breadpudding. "What are we having tonight? Oh bread pudding? That's AWESOME!". It's probably be true the first couple of times - or, well, it's bread pudding for chrissakes, that's not even pudding bad example - but in the long run, a lifetime of safe, predictable bread puddings isn't going hold be nuthin on a bullet through the head. So, I suppose that maybe, just maybe we should allow these youngsters - still wet behind the ears and bopping around cluelessly to Haddaway - their minute of graduation bliss.

We can save that collective sigh of relief at the silence that follows the vanishing trucks for later. Let them cheer and wave at you, they don't care that you're fiddling with your phone pretending you're doing anything else but paying attention, they probably don't even see how hard you're trying to not notice them. And if a few of them do fall off the back of the truck which some will inevitably do because of too much - yeah, sure, I'll give them this -"hummus" then maybe you could even pick them up and dust them off.

At the end of the road, because there will be an end to this road, maybe it's all about these minutes of mindlessness, beer and anticipation. Eventually the garlands of flowers around their necks will wilt. Us adults, we all know that.



But there's nothing to say that they can never be replaced.

I'd like to think that.