Hotel Team Sweden

I don't know why but I feel so bad for strewing my crap all over poor Mustang Guy's apartment, which is where I am camping out in the quest for a house. I feel like I'm trashing a hotel room, but without the requisite rockstar mini-bar and swimming pool to throw the TV into. To enjoy the lovely balcony view you now have to climb over two suitcases, two garbage bags and numerous moving boxes (which incidentally is the sum total of all my possessions). Of course that didn't stop me from lazing out there yesterday evening with a trashy magazine (voluminous skirts are in this season, girls) and half a bottle of Wolf Blass Chardonnay.

My new friend and potential flatmate (whom we shall call Uma since she is so beautiful and Swedish-looking despite her rather comforting penchant for Burger King) and I may have found an apartment though, we find out on Monday. We are "holding our thumbs" as they say here (no don't ask, I cannot for the life of me work out where that saying comes from).

Meanwhile I camp out among the boxes and read messages from my friends in faraway places. Really, their lives are far more interesting than mine right now and I'm considering abandoning this whole blog and writing about them instead - Adventurous H is working in Millionaire Marina somewhere in Canada with the likes of Bill Clinton. She just had to go and "drive an inflatable to get the shopping." Eco Hero is in "the ass end of Mexico filming horses die. Had to say grace over a plate of deep fried sheeps balls in george w's favourite restaurant last week before eating them" he reports. So all in all the boxes aren't so bad - Eco Hero is a vegetarian for starters.

Anyway, it's pouring outside (I tried to capture the strange light in the photo but probably failed since it was taken on my phone) and this lonely little petunia has nowhere to go - everyone is on summer holidays- and I can't get home until it stops. I'm stuck in the office. Which, by the way, was recommended as a place to live by a certain staff member here. Now I'm sorry, I already spend quite enough time here without bunking down between the fax and the coffee machine thank you very much. Not to mention being woken up at 5am by overzealous volunteers or worse some kind of clandestine office affair. Imagine it... I'll just hang my wardrobe over here by the finance statements and the spare linen can go in the server room - perfect, it'll be warm and dry in no time!

But while being homeless was kind of unsettling at first (and thanks to Mustang Guy at least I have Hotel Team Sweden, Team Australia is certainly indebted) but it's also kind of freeing. Uma and I are looking forward to (read: obsessing about) finding something great - it just sure as hell won't be in the photocopy room.

I thought I was muffin

I am writing this from my Team Sweden safehouse, and I'm not sure whether it is a nice silence or a lonely silence or just too much damn ice-cream in one day. Someone's music is drifting up from the street, and it's kind of nostalgic. I really, really hope it's not Phil Collins.

I've made my escape from Maniac Mansion and now I'm hoping that things will fall into place the way they usually do, eventually, when crises happen. Although Team Sweden (in the extended sense) has provided exemplary service in helping me settle in and feel loved, there is still a big hole in my life and my bank account. I really thought by the time I was 27 I would have sorted this out. I think the biggest problem which becomes insurmountable on days like today is the fact that you have to face the brutal truth about muffins, and how, no matter how much you wish you were one, there will always be another.

Let me explain the muffin phenomenon.

My friend who I have affectionately termed Canada Boy told me how he used to call people "muffin" as a joke. As in, "Oh don't worry muffin, it's all going to be ok, let me buy you an icecream". One day his ex-girlfriend got very upset when she heard him calling another girl "muffin". "But I thought I was muffin!" the girlfriend said. Big mistake. "No-one is muffin, there is no muffin, in fact I don't actually call people 'muffin'," he protested. Evidently, she didn't believe him, and in what may or may not have been a related incident they broke up soon after. I guess you just can't go back after that kind of betrayal.

Today I had that feeling. There are far too many muffins, and hey, I thought I was muffin. By the way that's another horrible thing about unrequited love - you quickly discover you are not muffin and worse... that other muffin is quite attractive. And since when is SHE muffin? And what's wrong with me, aren't I good enough to be muffin? And on and on ad nauseum. The muffin phenomenon has the added side-effect of giving you the urge to do stupid things to reclaim your muffin-ness, like spilling your heart by text message (I think this is a very unwise idea, but so horribly tempting. Perhaps I should extend my "no alcohol and computers" and "don't drink and dial" rule to "no texting past 8pm". Hell, let's be on the safe side and evolve that to an all-inclusive policy of "no electronic communications while under the influence of alcohol, PMS or extraordinary lunar activity").

Anyway after my lonely nostalgic day I sent Canada Boy a message saying "I got that 'hey, but I thought I was muffin!' feeling today."

His response? "Aww, muffin".

Nightswimming

I suppose it sounds kind of romantic, swimming naked at midnight across the lake in Stockholm with the police helicopter lights glinting off the water. Or actually, just plain uncomfortable.

It all started when a friend who shall remain anonymous decided he wanted to swim home, despite the existence of a perfectly good bridge. Concerned for his safety, my other friend decided to swim with him and then come back (he shall become quite a signficant character in this blog, being my unrequited love, and whom we shall call The Little Dutchman despite the fact he is neither Dutch nor little). Anyway I decided I would be on "safety watch" citing partly my primary school lifesaving certificate but mostly my Australian-ness. At the time it was irrelevant that even if these two factors were a reflection of any kind of lifesaving ability, I had drunk an awful amount of wine in the previous 3 hours.

The boys set off for the other side of the lake (Dutchman making cat noises as he went to assure me he was ok, which were echoed in a surreal moment by passing Swedes at the nearby bar). I decided to go for a discrete little dip while they were away. I abandoned my clothes and slipped in, just as a noisy police helicopter started strafing the water with spotlights from above. It never occurred to me that we weren't supposed to be swimming there. In fact it made it all seem a little bit more dramatic, like a scene from King Kong or something.

As I clambered out of the water, naked as the day I was born, I heard a voice above me. "Sorry, I speak English," I said in my standard response to anything anyone says to me, finding myself surprisingly not very embarrassed about my utter nakedness. "Those police, they are looking for someone who has escaped across the water. Is it you?" I don't know how they expected me to answer if it was me, but now the nakedness was signficant - in the God-fearing heads of these good souls, I had just become an escaped mental patient swimming for her life from Stockholm to Sydney. "Um... we um... just thought we'd go for a swim," I said faintly, cringing as more cat noises promptly echoed across the water. "I'm on... Safety Watch..." I clutched my bottle of Heineken tighter as I said this and wrapped myself in a towel, trying to curl up like a graceful version of the Little Mermaid but no doubt failing miserably.

After staring at me suspiciously (at least I hope it was suspiciously) the police informers left. For one minute I wondered if a police car would arrive to drag Dutchman and I naked to a police cell, so managed to put on at least half of my underwear in a vain attempt at dignity. As Dutchman arrived and "dried off in the sun" (and don't be under any illusions, there was NO midnight sun to be seen at this point, only the intermittent romantic glow of police spotlights) I threw a towel over him and we made our escape, me bedraggled and with mascara running down my face like ... an escaped mental patient swimming for her life from Stockholm to Sydney.

The night grew even more surreal as Dutchman was convinced by our mutual friend known as Papa Pelle to make sure that this was the night I escaped from the clutches of my slightly-deranged flatmate. As we wandered through the graveyard near my house I became a little incensed that Dutchman had previously shown absolutely no concern that I might be murdered in my sleep by the crazy chef with a collection of expensive meat-cleavers.

Papa is the head of a delegation of my friends which I affectionately call Team Sweden. They are the ones who will drop everything to save you - including but not limited to: comforting phone calls when you are confronted with a strange woman's underwear in an ex-boyfriend's apartment, lending you a bed while you are hiding out from psycho flatmates, and possibly bailing you out of a police cell when you have been mis-diagnosed as a mental patient.

Team Sweden's international security service was a little strained last night. I guess this is understandable since it was 2am and Dutchman continually failed to recognise the life-threatening situation I was so obviously in. Reluctantly the Dutchman conceded that I could "possibly maybe be in danger" with a "5% chance" of me being murdered that evening, and marched me to a Team Sweden safehouse. He left me at the door, with memories of nightswimming, the potential for a horrendous hangover, and an overwhelming wish that I really meant something to him.

Photo credit: The photo is not mine but is borrowed from the wonderful Sally Mann, since I was in no fit state to be handling a camera.

Random acts of co-habitation

I think I'm getting old. I no longer appreciate the sound of salsa music at 3am, or when my flatmate consumes the entire bottle of Bombay Sapphire (my precious!) that was a present from my mum, or when I find random hungover people snoring on the couch every morning - or worse still in my bed (usually, mercifully, when I'm not also in it). Oh hang on a minute - I never liked those things.

I have no idea how but that's how my household has ended up recently. Ironically it's been inflicted on me by an older guy with two kids, a profile that naive little me always associated with responsiblity, reliability, self-sacrifice and other qualities that would be quite nice in a flatmate. Admittedly he works in a restaurant that is "Cuban by day, Italian by night", a culinary concept I have yet to get my head around, and has contributed nothing to the hygiene department of the house except a can of shaving cream (which has since been claimed by my colleague and therefore isnt't even a legitimate contribution).

Random co-habitation is one of the pitfalls of being young(ish), single and moving haphazardly to the opposite side of the world. I have always felt that it's very unjust - there are charities to assist other unfortunate victims of our social stereotypes - why not a foundation for the victims of enforced shared housing? When you think about it, it's the basis of society for those of us unlucky enough to still be students or Microserfs at this age.

Up until now though I have to say I've been exceptionally lucky - my former flatmate just happened to be a kind soul who wasn't averse to cleaning toilets or pulling hair out of the shower drain. But alas, you really don't know what you've got til it's gone, and it's certainly gone when I have bought my 16th roll of toilet paper and washed my 475th risotto-encrusted saucepan.

Unfortunately the city I live in is by all accounts hard enough to find a shared flat in let alone one for myself. I considered sleeping under my desk in the office - not too far a stretch from where I usually spend my sad lonely evenings anyway - but decided that I was a few empty gin bottles (possibly consumed by me this time) and dishwashing sessions away from that yet. Maybe.