For those of you who are not in contact with me on a daily basis, you may not know that I’m spending this weekend in Stockholm. Thursday and Friday are for work here in Stockholm, and after that we’re spending the rest of the week here too.

I’m very undecided about Stockholm. It’s got a lot of nice places, sure. But…

• The atmosphere is odd. People are driving like crazy, they use the car horn for minor things, they are rude, and there’s a very superficial air about everything.
• The house prices are enormous. From what I’ve heard, the going rate is about $7,500 per square meter. Paying $2,000-$3,000 a month in rent is not at all weird; some places more than that.
• Everything is small and shabby. And old. A friend we ran into here spent $600,000 on an apartment that’s smaller than mine back home.
• The daily commute is a nightmare. Back where I live, 25 minutes in the car to work feels like a long time. Here, you may easily double this figure. Or triple it. Or possibly quadruple it.

I can’t say that I miss home very much, because there’s nothing back home but a cold, empty apartment; but I miss the friendly atmosphere, miss having a burger at McD’s, and I miss not getting ruined by buying a sandwich at a café. Quite frankly, I don’t really see what all the buzz is about. Although, yes, Stureplan is a little bit upscale from ICA Nordeviks, I get it, but…

Anyway. I’m going to bed now. More exploring to do tomorrow.

This chart depicts the growth of the worldwide population (in thousands) from 1750 to 2000.

I think the chart in itself is so absurd that no explanation is necessary.

It’s interesting to note that the initial figure – about 800 million – is the total population growth since the dawn of time until 1750.

The world population at different times in history, as estimated by Wikipedia:

• At the time of Abraham in the old testament (1900 BC): somewhere around 35 million.
• About at the time of Israel’s hey-days (900 BC): roughly 50-60 million.
• Around the birth of Jesus (1 AD): 200 million.
• Deep in the Medieval age (1000 AD): 300 million.
• Today (2005 AD): 6.4 billion.

Nyligen upphittat.

Om du försöker hitta hem men istället hela tiden kommer tillbaka till samma gamla sandgrop, kan det faktiskt vara så att sandgropen förföljer dig.

Titta in till någon när som helst om du känner för det. Säger de “Usch, är det du!” kan du ju titta ut igen.

Alla kan inte och somliga vill inte. Så är det bara.

Ibland är en båt en båt och ibland är den närmast en Olyckshändelse. Det beror alldeles på om du är över eller under den.

Ibland, när man står på den nedersta slån på bron och lutar sig fram och ser ån långsamt flyta fram under sig, vet man plötsligt allt som finns att veta.

Fastän det är väldigt gott att äta honung, så finns det ett ögonblick alldeles innan man börjar äta den som nästan är ännu bättre.

När man är en Björn med Mycket Liten Hjärna och Tänker Ut Saker, upptäcker man ibland att en Idé som verkade vara riktigt Idéaktig inne i hjärnan, är helt annorlunda när den kommer ut i det fria och andra människor ser på.

Bra visdomsord att leva efter. :)

Lights. Must get lights.

I’ve never been one to make a cozy feeling at home, what with furniture and curtains and stuff. My place has been decorated in a kind of classy, comfortable way with a heavy bachelor tone. Sometimes I wish I had that homely touch, but the cleaning-up spirit always disintegrates shortly after I sit down at the piano to just “brush off some of these old songs I found”.

Now, it’s the lights. I don’t have any lamps. The few ones that come preinstalled with the apartment are far too garish and crude, and only sit in the kitchen anyhow. And during the summer, it’s so light outside anyway that I hardly need lights. So the two lamps I had in the living room, well, one kind of developed an electrical fault (!) and in the other, the lightbulb went and I forgot (repeatedly) to buy spares.

But now that fall is upon us, and it gets really dark, I suddenly realize that I’m all out of light! It kind of gets bad when I have to turn on the TV set and set the channel to some light entertainment (pun intended) so I can see what I’m doing in my living-room.

The ironic thing is that I feel so … cliché. I have laptops. I have a home theatre entertainment system. I have wireless broadband, a Linux server in the basement that hosts my PHP development projects, and am connected with all the knowledge of the entire world at my fingertips.

But I sure don’t have any lamps.

Sometimes I really think my life could use a bit of a female touch.

I switched places at work today.

The desk opposite my old one is adjustable in height, which makes it possible to stand up or sit down while working. In realizing that I’ve been sitting down for basically the past 33 years (okay, exaggerating), I thought it’d be a nice change.

And it is. I’ve been standing up nonstop since switching, and it’s a wonderful difference. It feels just great, being able to stand up and work and not constantly sitting on my butt all the time :) Now that I have tried it, I think it should be a mandatory requirement at all workplaces, to have adjustable desks.

I’ve also started walking: Twice a week I now try to take at least one-hour walks, which feels great. I miss the outdoors actually, and the long walks I used to go on many years ago.

Perhaps this is the start of a healthier life. I hope so.

Maybe there would be a market for “Comfort Pillows”? Big, comfy, huggable pillows that you can snuggle up with in the couch after having one of those days.

There might be a lot of different messages on the pillows themselves, depending on the situation, and depending on what particular dumb thing you or someone else might have done today.

• “God loves me anyway”
• “Well, I think I’m pretty”
• “I hope tomorrow will be better”
• “This could have been you, dummy”
• “Who cares about passwords, the sun is shining”

…any other? :)

I noticed some birds on the lawn to work a few days ago. The grass had just been mowed, and they were walking around, searching for bugs, worms or other forms of juicy food.

When I saw that, the thought struck me: They are hunters/gatherers.

The first step in society development was groups of people hunting together. The men might have gone out to hunt food, the women might have gathered berries, roots, herbs and other edible items. The ability of a certain location to sustain a given population was severely limited by the amount of food available. This was the situation for “barbaric tribes” in northern Europe during the classical period; and nomadic peoples still exhibit this behavior today – keeping a livestock, moving from place to place.

The next step in the evolution of civilizations was farming: no longer relying on hunting and gathering, people had learned to cultivate the land to produce crops. The entire Roman Empire was founded on farming; especially North Africa being the breadbasket of entire Rome and being the motor of the entire Roman economy.

The cultivation of land also meant that the sustainable population increased dramatically, because they were no longer limited to what nature had to offer, but had learned to sustain themselves through artificial means.

Of course, from there we have ongoing levels of sophistication: improved farming techniques (e.g. using oxen for plowing – which transformed the whole medieval agrarian society) and onwards through the enlightenment to industrialization and the present information age society in which we live today; a world capable of sustaining billions.

Birds have obviously not gotten that far yet. They are still in the hunting/gathering stage – one might even say they haven’t even gotten to hunting yet – and this is why they are so obviously limited in their population. As natural resources (insects, seeds etc) decrease, so does the bird population.

If only they were to discover farming! Sowing crops, harvesting, using granaries to store food, would multiply the sustainable bird population by several times, and result in a significant development of the avian civilization. (Using oxen for plowing might prove a difficulty though.)

It’s a pity, though, that they have such small brains. I think it would be very difficult to teach them the long-term benefits of agriculture.

Oh, and wings might be a problem… no opposing thumb.

I watched “The Lake House” today again, featuring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. What a great movie.

But I had already gone to bed, when I started thinking about what it might be like to actually meet her (Sandra) one day. And, well, of course, it doesn’t take much figuring before you’re dreaming up scenarios and how we’d be talking to each other and laugh… which of course would never happen, because in real life, she is probably just like any other real person and would just have gone on with her life, and I with mine. The end. That was fun.

So what’s so special with her anyway? Nothing, I guess, apart from all the ordinary uniqueness in her person and her individuality, which in that respect makes her completely just like everyone else.

In fact, perhaps, sometimes, we’re so attuned to this great ideal, this Hollywood image of a person, that we forget that there are many, many others, just as unique and individual as her. What about all the Lillemors and Kerstins and retired Göstas down the street? Might they not be just as interesting? Might they not, if one looked into their particular lives, have interesting stories to tell, and be people worth knowing? Perhaps we’re so used to dealing with people as unnamed entities (“customers”, “clients”, “patients”) that we forget to see the unique individual behind.

There was a website once – I can’t find it now – called one billion people, or a million voices or something like that. It consisted of videotaped people, each talking about feelings, hopes, love, truth, pain; and all of them with their own particular stories to tell. I liked to browse through them very much, just to see what people had experienced and wanted to share.

Or am I perhaps wrong? Sometimes – especially when spending a lot of time reading blogs – I feel like the world consists of millions and millions of parrots, each echoing what the other one said. Maybe there is a point to my cynical feelings. If everyone is unique, how unique is that?

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just rambling. But there is something to it, still: That sudden gleam of interest, that desire, in getting to know people and realizing that there is something special inside every one of us – not just our political views (Oh God how boring) but the way we feel about things, lessons we’ve learned in life. It’s a thought I am not too willing to let go of.

In any case, I certainly won’t pin any dreams on meeting a particular movie star or otherwise famous person; it might be just as worthwhile to meet the next person down the street in a slightly new way.

And now… back to bed.

It’s a quarter to 11pm on Sunday evening, and I’m reading the Wikipedia article on Latin verb conjugation.

I need a life.