Alex's Alliterative Adventures

Sweden’s weather is just plain weird. A perfect cloudless day will change to a torrential downpour with the occasional airborne cat and back in the span of ten minutes. It might be because it’s a small country that’s surrounded by sea, I don’t know, but for one reason or another the clouds here fly much lower and faster than I’m used to, which explains the schizophrenic weather patterns.Living under a perpetually turmoiled sky makes for some great, if not risky, cloud watching. Shapes are fleeting and impermanent, and yet their closeness makes them more tangible, as if you could take them home in a jar or leap up and glide among them. Watching the heavens makes a part of you think that you’re stuck in one of those time-lapse scenes in a documentary, except the people around you have conveniently forgotten that they are supposed to be fast-forwarding.

Sorry for the absence, all, but I’ve been in crazy-death-mode for the past little while.  The past 4 days have been filled with 13 hours of choir practices, classes, assignments, and 5 interviews.  I also have a giant-ass project that I’m sorely behind on due on the 10th, and I have 5 more interviews up to that point. So yeah, posting will continue to be sparse until then.

I will bitch a bit, though.  Last night, I had an interview with Digital Extremes in London. They helped Epic Games make Unreal, UT, UT2k4, and Epic Pinball, which I grew up playing.  I’ve essentially turned down job offers just so I could have the chance to talk to these guys.  I think that Sweden was just conspiring against my returning to Canada, because the call quality was abysmal.  There was about a second of lag, our voices kept breaking up, and after about 20 minutes we just stopped being able to hear each other entirely.  They’re going to consider me nonetheless, but it’s a kick in the pants.  And the worst part is that I was able to secure the use of my own private office with a private wired phone line in my department, but I don’t get the key until next week sometime.  This is the sort of thing that could drive someone into a life of high-prescription glasses, low-voiced near assertive mumbling, and an obsession with red staplers.

I’ll throw up a post I wrote a little while ago to appease you guys.  Go gnaw on it, and try not to chew up the couch when I’m gone.

9 problems. 5 hours. 3 men. 1 computer.

Finishing position: 3rd/38th.  Qualifying position: 2nd place. All-expenses paid weekend trip to Stockholm to compete in the regionals:  hells yes, bitches.

Also: 1 free t-shirt.

I’ve spent the past week or so cooped up in my room, juggling resume spamming, corporate research, scheduling phone interviews between time zones totalling 15 hours of time differences (with and without daylight savings time), writing thank you notes, completing assignments, skip- er, attending lectures, investigating 3D mesh animation, climbing walls, cooking, cleaning, and eating. I’ve been working or being otherwise ridiculously productive for between 10 and 18 hours each day. I finish assignments while waiting for emails to download, I write blog posts while the professor moves between slides, and I implement linked queues in C++ between mouthfuls of barely cooked pasta. I’m also thinking about getting a job.

In my experience, getting the chance to sing in a choir is compensation in and of itself. That being said, it certainly ups the singers’ moral when the local student audiences reward the choir’s performances with thunderous applause, screams for an encore, and free booze. Why isn’t singing this popular in Canada?

If you answered Swedish Berries, then you were wrong.  I have no idea of what they actually are, but it’s sure not Swedish Berries, that’s for sure.

I’m sorry, Adrian.

Swedish is officially one of the world’s stupidest languages. If you want to say I drink beer, you can use the phrase “Jag dricker öl”, or I drink beer.  You can also say “Öl dricker jag”, which also means I drink beer. If a giant mutant evil beer has shoved you into an oversized novelty straw and is slowly drinking you to death, shouting out “Beer drinks me!” in Swedish will just get you some funny looks, and perhaps a “congratulations” from a few young males. Normally this isn’t a big issue, but if you want to say with clarity that the red dog bit the black dog, you just can’t.  Susie misses Jack?  Nope.

And worst of all, the Soviet Russia joke is not just ruined, it can’t exist.  Worst country ever.

Swedes are a very reserved people. They follow rules, and they’re very aware of what is and what isn’t socially acceptable. This is when I was very confused when the casually whistling Swedish guy grabbed my butt. He then looked at me, smiled, and said something in Swedish. When I responded in confused, broken english, he told me that I looked so bored. He was quite glad that he succeeded in making me look much less bored.

I’ve been groped before, but only at crowded parties where my new close acquaintance disappeared before I could spot them. Now I have irrefutable proof that I am in fact a nice piece of ass.

The photos are a bit small, but they’re of me suspended above the ground, so they do the trick. And holy crap, climbing shoes are small.

I had to pay the second installment of my rent today.  I realized that my rent is around $200 cheaper for the entire term than my friend’s rent.  My friend lives 3-5 times closer to campus than I do, and his internet connection is 200 times faster than mine. And just to add fuel to the fire of jealousy, he’s trying to move here.  I mean, he’s a good guy, but I wouldn’t trust his decision making skills.

So I wandered down to Ye Olde Banke to pay my big ol’ bill, and lucky for me, I had just enough money between my chequing account and my wallet to cover the bill, with just under $2 CAD remaining. I gave the bank teller the invoice and started counting out an uncomfortably large number of bills, but I was interrupted by her quoting me an amount that was 50kr ($8 CAD) more than what the bill had said.  I blinked as she explained that there was a 50kr charge for paying a bill.  Sweden gets a lot of things right, but whoever thought up the fee-payment-fee needs a good ol’ fashioned face stabbing.

First of all, I just wanted to say that I have a new goal in life: Become pacman.

I was invited out to a local pub with a few of my friends on Friday night. Since I was still feeling under the weather, I figured that a quiet night sharing a drink or two with close friends would be healthier than hitting up one of the Friday night parties here in Lund. I was obviously slightly misinformed, though, since the “pub” was actually a “traditional Swedish music and dancing night at the people’s university”.  I actually had a lot of fun.  I got to see a part of Swedish culture that I can only presume is usually hidden from the common tourist eye. Swedish dancing is crazy; they slap their shoes, slap the floor, and kick their feet out like Russians. After we’d seen our fill of Swedish culture, I lead my friends to an actual pub. Much to my surprise, my Austrian friends instantly identified it as an Austrian pub.  I might not have picked up on this the last few times I had patronized the place because they didn’t serve Austrian beer, and they also thought that the Austrian flags hanging in the middle of the pub were German. It was still a decent place, though.  There’s just something warm and comforting about drinking in what could’ve been an underground bombshelter in some alternative existence.

We ended the night reasonably early in order to be fresh for Saturday’s rock climbing expedition.  We headed to Soffabacken, which is an outdoor climbing area about an hour and a half north of Lund.  There was one other girl there who was reasonably new, but I wouldn’t feel ashamed in saying her abilities, like everyone else’s, were beyond mine.  For those of you who haven’t been rock climbing with me before, don’t feel left out.  I’ve actually climbed an actual indoor rock climbing wall about 5 times in my entire life. My outdoor climbing experience includes trees, low walls, ladders, and probably my dog when I was small enough to imagine he was a horsie. I had a ton of fun, and my climbing got a lot better as the day progressed. I didn’t finish a few walls, but I topped them all except for one by the time people were talking about packing up.  I decided to give the wall I had only partially climbed another chance.

I was off to a fresh start.  I used the techniques I learned from the other walls and other climbers to my advantage.  Lift with your legs, not your arms.  The chalk marks are the way to go. Trust your shoes.  Wearing pants reduces bleeding by up to 100%. Even though I was in fine novice form, I got stuck at the same place as before.  I saw two paths, and they both bested me time after time.  After each of my 5 or 6 falls, Emma (my belayer) would yell out her encouragement to me and convince me to give it one more shot.  Even when I asked her nicely to let me down, she urged me to try again. Even when I calmly explained to here that I had eaten batches of jello that were more firm than my arms were, she wouldn’t let me down. When I told her that I was done for the day, I’d accepted my defeat, and I didn’t have to climb every wall on my first day out, she told me she wasn’t letting me down until I tried just one last time.  The feeling of wanting to punch someone so very badly but having no energy left to do so is a very ironic one. I tried to focus myself for one last push. Trust the shoe. Trust the shoe. Picture Jenn at the top of the rope.  Trust the shoe.  Swear at the wall.  Trust the shoe.  Never stop swearing.  Trust the shoe.

Before my body had time to complain, I threw myself back onto the wall.  I pulled, I reached, I strained myself back to the the spot that I thought of as the peak of my accomplishments. And then, I was passed it.  I had kept hold of the next rock!  The next was suddenly in my hand, and the next came just as fast.  My weakening muscles were preemted by two things far more powerful – adrenaline and determination. I wish I had climbed with a camera, because the view from the top of that rope was spectacular. On the way back down, I was shocked  – I thought that I had nothing left.  I was sure of it.

I was looking for a quote from Gattaca that fit what I felt, but I found a much better one instead: It’s funny, you work so hard, you do everything you can to get away from a place, and when you finally get your chance to leave, you find a reason to stay.

As usual, there will be pictures when there are pictures.