I went to Stockholm and only let about five people know about my trip. You couldn’t really expect me to hide something as big as that from my husband and son? Call it a “retreat”. The apartment I stayed in made me feel like George Bernard Shaw once said about Croatia’s Gem,

If you want to see heaven on earth, come to Dubrovnik

De som söker himmelen på jorden måste komma till Dubrovnik

I like! However, I would also “like” to add, if you want to see a piece of heaven in Scandinavia, come to “en levande stad i Europa“… and get to know one of their legal councillors. However, she’s one of these people who would probably agree with Cicero, the Roman author and politician from some time around 100 BC, and I quote,

Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

In other words, she let Maria be Maria, even if that means Maria wants zulu time (UTC) speaking to the world.

Did I say that I forgot my mobile phone? Sometimes I’m glad for my amnesia for that one “mistake” resulted in so many meetings with complete strangers. For example, I couldn’t call “my lawyer” to tell her that I was running about one hour late due to our time optimism, for it had nothing to do with my SAS flight SK152 being 15 minutes late? In my non-mobile creativeness I figured I could let (SWEDISH) Ericsson“take me forward” by letting someone who lives down under (a hill?) drop me off at Haga Forum in style (i.e. a-hugely-expensive-Maria-can-not-bring-herself-to-afford-TAXI).

If you’re interested, I can really recommend the film Taxi Driver. For some reason it reminds me of Sin City. I am also infatuated with Jodie Foster. Jodie, I’m glad you didn’t take the roll in Hannibal, even though that is one film where I can, not-bring-myself-to-write-but-what-the-heck, relate.

P.S. Doug Horton got it right; it took me forever.

“If you love something let it go free. If it doesn’t come back, you never had it. If it comes back, love it forever.”

P.P.S. Thanks (for the German/Swedish) BECK.

My Neurologist is starting me up on Hermolepsin Retard (carbamazepine). I just found out and I am going to pick up the prescription before I head off to the airport tomorrow for a weekend retreat chez Anna.

Description
Carbamazepine is given as a monotherapy or in combination with lithium or neuroleptics and has been found useful in the treatment of acute mania and the prophylactic treatment of bipolar (manic-depressive) disorders. Carbamazepine is an anticonvulsant and specific analgesic for trigeminal neuralgia.

Just perfect. Not sure how I am suppose to take the above description from RealMentalHealth.com. I guess I should just trust my physician that he knows what he’s doing. I had a seizure when all this started. I don’t want another one, mostly for reasons relating to my driver’s licence. If that means taking a tricyclic compound, so be it.

In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.

Alfred Hitchcock

Who do you think said the following?

“Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”

“Vem som helst kan räkna antalet kärnor i ett äpple. Bara Gud kan räkna antalet äpplen i en kärna.”

“N’importe qui peut compter le nombre de pépins dans une pomme. Seul un grand visionnaire peut compter le nombre de pommes dans un pépin.”

Something as clever as that must surely be taken from the Bible and/or the 1989 (Western?) edition of the Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, right? You’re almost there…

Answer: “The Reverend Dr. Robert Harold Schuller (born September 16, 1926), an American televangelist and pastor known around the world through his weekly broadcast ‘The Hour of Power’”. And I who always hated watching “Praise the Lord” shows on TV.

“…the coming century will most surely witness either a coalition or a collision between Islam and Christianity… True believers in God must move our society and our world from incompatibility to compatibility; from intolerance to tolerance; positive Christians and Muslims becoming partners in peace.” [...]

I will survive…

…very much thanks to you, Lena. Your musical work is more important than my current physiological state. Hence, this is why you (and the rest of your team) have one of the most important jobs in the world. Below video is for all of you!

Please click here. I’m not kidding.

Just tell me where to sign the dotted line. “For everything else, there’s MasterCard”.

F i n a l l y I have an organisation to turn to for my primary brain tumour. My doctors, nurses and soon-to-enter-Maria’s life Psychologist, are all sweet. BUT(T) sometimes I feel I want to talk to someone who is actually going through a life crisis such as my own. Perhaps just to help me with the one phrase that just won’t leave my head, “why me, why not me, why me, why not me, why me, why not me…”. To the untrained eye it would probably be classed as aberration, dementia, derangement, lunacy, madness, mania… (all in alphabetical order). For me? Narnia.

We have a pastor in my church who reminds me of Minority Report. He has been nice to give me some of his time as of late even though we hardly knew each other before I fell ill. I can’t remember at quite what point during one of our conversations that he finished off with the courteous phrase, “Allt gott”. I wanted to bite his head off, for I thought he was insane to say “Allt gott” (translation: All well/good/bien/bon/tasty) to me, a 28 year-old cancer case. At the utterance of these two words, I was able to remain calm, smile without using my eyes, and walk away. I am not sure if I would smile today if left in a similar situation. However, I believe I asked for a very good explanation via email some time later. See, this is where communication is so important. His term “Allt gott” I guess you could say is the equivalent of the phrase “With Christian greetings”, a phrase I read every time I get an email with an attached Prayer/Information letter from a couple in Manchester.

The pair, who have just celebrated their 40th anniversary in South Africa, are connected with the Globe Café and work for Friends International in Greater Manchester. I can’t remember how I started speaking to someone who looks like Santa Clause, but I totally fell for the white-bearded man at Manchester University’s International Society, where I was taking refuge after my “incident” with ICC/ICOC. It also turned out that their location was just a few blocks from my halls of residence, Canterbury Court, on Kent Road East. Hence I started going to Globe Café to sip tea with (mostly) Chinese students as well as learn some new proverbs, which naturally originated from the Bible.

A lot of good came out of these meetings, such as later meeting Jane (JC) and her beautiful mother. I still can’t believe I delighted in (SWEDISH) Blixt’s stew comprising of English sausages and chicken liver! We went on some pretty wild trips where I had my own delight and fed JC “Kalles Kaviar“. I know you thought Swedish Kaviar was appalling, but I believed that if I can learn to like Marmite then Kalles should be effortless.

“Kaviar is the classic sandwich paste made from cod roe. Kalle is the fair-haired boy who is on the tube – his father was the managing director at the time of the product’s launch in 1954. Abba the manufacture is a long-established company so Abba the band had to ask permission.”

Text from book Things Swedish

Marmite? I thought it was Nutella the first time I tried it in Canterbury Court, Flat 13. Listen up, France! There are other spreads for your breakfast toast than “chocolaty hazelnut spread”. God should know. I deduce it was either the woman footballer or the margareta medic (definitely not Biochem-AZPhD or “cleaning whilst spraying perfume”) who offered the naive Swedish girl a nice big taste. Need I add that I was the only foreigner in the flat (thanks for the card by the way)? One last note before I finish off and take ”just” 1 x 10 mg of what-ever-it-is-called. Now I understand why my husband always cracks up when I talk about living in a flat with ten British girls. A flat(a) is supposedly slang for lesbian in Swedish. Girls, should I let the world’s imagination run wild, for we were definitely gay, right? Speaking of gay (or lack of), does any of you know what happened to “Scraggy”, which I should add she absolutely loathed being called. And I just did.

Last but not least, it was YOUR TOAST, Ms. Tinkerbell, that left me yearning for more. Interestingly, I believe the last jar I picked up was in a small shop in Beit Hanina, Jerusalem. I really have tried to “seek first to understand” and I still don’t comprehend. Am I just being fed the “wrong” web sites?

“Food for thought”: Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -Thomas A. Edison-

On Friday my book club is meeting up and I am responsible for bringing in the desert.

Is there an easy way to remember the spelling of dessert? Even more, does anyone have a fabulous recipe, which I should add needs to be relatively fast and easy? I have Dana’s tiramisu recipe as well as her mother Daniela Ozik’s Lasagna recipe. Dana, I didn’t know that your Italian mother, who fed us her delicious lasagna after volley-ball practises and tournaments, is publishing cookbooks in JAPANESE! No wonder you needed some time to translate the recipe.

Do you remember how long it took for us to make the Tiramisu? Long enough to have time to discuss a marvelous book, such as Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom?

Last night I tried the “stronger sleeping pills” my Neurologist prescribed to me the other day. The bottle looks pretty spacey with its plastic castle-like screw-on top. I still haven’t been given any pill bottles with safety lids during “the disease”. I remember in Toronto as an eight year-old that I could never get into my parents pill bottles for I couldn’t unscrew the caps. I used to hate that. I wanted to put the stuff into the magic potions my four year-old brother and I used to brew in the basement. To think of it, I wish I had kept a lab book during that time, for I didn’t know then that it was worth writing all experiments down as it could become useful for a publication in Nature. However, the magic was Tide (Via Colour) and earwigs (tvestjärtar). The earwigs needed to be ground first, though. I’m sure there are several methods for this, but my favourite was squashing the poor sods in a glass bowl with a second class bowl on top. My mother’s Peter BODUMs worked perfectly. And you all wonder why my brother and I are so clever? Because we didn’t OD on Tylenol!

Since around Easter I have started using the word Gehenna quite frequently. To better explain, I have included below explanation from JewishEncylopedia.com

The place where children were sacrificed to the god Moloch was originally in the “valley of the son of Hinnom,” to the south of Jerusalem (Josh. xv. 8, passim; II Kings xxiii. 10; Jer. ii. 23; vii. 31-32; xix. 6, 13-14). For this reason the valley was deemed to be accursed, and “Gehenna” therefore soon became a figurative equivalent for “hell.”

I like the more simpler explanation I was given by a friend, “Gehenna är en gammal soptipp i Jerusalem”. Same, same but different, as my husband would say. I’m not sure if I could blame my Saroten for the Gehenna yesterday night or just the fact that Maria slept less than four hours the night before. I protected a post as I was scared it would come across as too insane. However, if you are interested, the password is OK?

I mentioned the ailment Tourettes syndrome in an earlier post. I believe I have found a more precise diagnosis (doctors’s must love having patients like me) namely, coprolalia. I may as well throw some copropraxia and coprographia in there as well. As I am figuring out how to work YouTube videos, here is another one to share with you. Welcome into my head.

Don’t forget to also play them simultaneously to understand the big, fat WHY!

Main Entry: ¹why
Pronunciation: 'hwI, 'wI
Function: adverb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hwy, instrumental case of hwæt what — more at WHAT
: for what cause, reason, or purpose <why did you do it?>