September love

I would quote one of my favourite Bon Jovi songs, it's pretty cold for late September... But that would be blatantly lying. We had 22 degrees celcius in my town today! For us, that's about as normal as a snowstorm in July. I've been sitting in my favourite park next to the art museum all afternoon, reading and taking photos. Lovely.

So, September is wrapping up. For years now, I've been making these lists in my diary, here's this month's:


Favourites of the month 

-old-school aerobics classes (my gym is very retro and kind of dodgy, and I love it!)
-jojoba oil (Has done wonders for my skin this month)
-my new blue teapot (Need I say more?)
-Jean Paul Gaultier: Classique (My favourite perfume of all time)
-dark red nailpolish (Suitably vampire-y and autumn-y)
-homemade facials with tea leaves and honey (Better than any store-bought face masks)
-wire craft (You know, making candle holders and bowls out of wire? I love it)
-my new fringe (Best. Decision. Ever.)

I've been reading a lot more books than usual this month. Favourites have been One day (I'm really looking forward to the movie), The Lessons och La dame aux camelias. I've also been buying cheap but ornate picture frames and made random collages to put in them. 

(I do admit that both the reading and the collage-making have diverted my attention from my thesis work more than they should... I'll do better in October, I swear!)


 My favourite discovery this month has to be the Yale lecture series that I randomly found on Youtube. Yes, apparently Yale University posts a handful of their lectures online. You probably have to be slightly nerdy to appreciate this, but I was over the moon! So these last weeks, in the evenings, while cooking or drawing, I've been attending Yale lectures on gender studies and American literature... Kind of amazing.


All in all, September has been a fairly good month, even though it started out stressful and chaotic. To me, October is usually less stressful and more cheerful - it is my birthday month, after all! I'm planning to spend this weekend making carrot cake, celebrating with various friends, visiting the art museum and hopefully get some studying done as well.

Much love!

Tiro avanti

Life goes on. That's one of the truely wonderful things about life - you can wallow all you want, but life goes on, and at one point it's going to drag you along with it, weather you like it or not.
 

(I do like it.)

Finally, we had our first real autumn day in my university town: The trees and bushes outside my window are starting to turn orange, and the air has a crisp, smoky, almost wintery note to it. Since September has been unusually warm so far, I'm perfectly okay with this - the winters here are certainly very harsh and long, but I'm still always looking forward to the change of seasons.

The change from early autumn to late autumn is for me also marked by my birthday - I'll be 25 in a week. And just like I'm looking forward to winter every year, I'm also still looking forward to my birthday. I don't like throwing parties for myself, but I do like to have that one day a year when I'm allowed to feel like it's all about me. That's what birthdays are all about, really: Simply celebrating the fact that you exist.

Because it truly is worth celebrating.

I'll be celebrating by cutting a fringe, buying the perfect shade of red nail polish and baking toffee-filled raspberry cupcakes. Sounds mature enough.

My birthday whishes this year:

The perfect red lipstick (I've found the perfect shade for my nails, but not for my lips)
A fragrance locket (because I love perfume and the idea is totally romantic)
Juggling balls (I learned to juggle when I was 18, and I really want to take it up again)
A new scent (I'm thinking a cheaper perfume, perhaps a Bodyshop one)
Metal wire (I'm really into wire craft and I'm constantly running out of material)
A negligee (I really want something silky and sort of boudoirish... Which seems to be hard to find in reasonably priced stores, since everything is either hot pink, leopard or flannel)
New skincare (because I seem to be running out of everything right now)


And of course I'd love to get flowers. And flowery things. And flowery pieces of clothing. My year-long obsession with flowerprints shows no sign of fading yet, even though I should probably be looking at knits and wintery things instead... Oh well.

I wish you all a sweet sunday!

X

An aquaintance of mine died a few days ago. I guess it's not really dawning on me until now. I'll write "aquaintance", because formally we only knew each other from singing in the same choir for three years. But that choir toured quite a bit, and nothing brings people together like travelling: Durings those trips I've shared lipbalms and fears with him, skinny dipped with him, dealt with grief and stagefright together with him. He was a couple of years younger than me, which enabled us to develop an uncomplicated, siblinglike relationship.

Choir ended two years ago, and we lost touch. This year though, he was a freshman at my uni, so we've been bumping into each other on campus every other day. When I first heard that he passed away, my first thought was "Well that can't be true, I just saw him yesterday!" A very logical thought indeed, but for a while I simply couldn't take it seriously. I didn't even want to call a mutual friend to tell her, because I was half-subconsciously waiting for someone to tell me it wasn't true - it felt like a cruel joke, and I didn't want to fall for it.

Nobody is as loved as when they die, that's true - suddenly everyone has nothing but wonderful things to say about you. This is why it feels like such a cliché to say that X was remarkable, unusual, exceptional. But he was, which is why it is so hard for me to believe that he is gone - him of all people. When I first got to know him he was only fifteen years old. Let's face it, most fifteen-year old boys are either hopelessly awkward or overtly cocky. X was none of these things - he was relaxed, warm and funny. And as he grew up, he continued to be these things. He was open, caring and compassionate beyond belief. Once before a concert when I was quietly upset because the boy I fancied back then had failed to show up, X determinedly took it upon him to entertain me and brighten my mood, playfully hugging me and making me laugh. I hadn't even realized I was behaving differently, but evidently he had sensed my sadness - and cared.

A friend of his recently wrote: "Someone so loved can't just disappear, can they?" And even though that may sound naive, that's a tought I've been entertaining myself. He was such a lively person, he had so many dreams, so many friends, such a big life, such a warm heart - where is it all now? How did that elusive thing we call life just slip away, leaving only dead materia behind? Death is truely a mystery, and even though I have my beliefs to help me handle this, the fact still remains - the world just lost someone who could have made it into a better place. Of course, he already did, by spreading love and compassion like noone else - but still, why him?

These things are impossible to write without resorting to clichées. But I felt the need to write it anyway. The thing is, I was never so close to him that it would make sense for me to show up at the funeral, and I know his truely close friends are having an awful time right now - I don't want to be intruding on their grief. So this is me grieving.

Mischief managed

I haven't really grasped the fact that it is autumn yet. The leaves are still so green, the weather is still so sunny. I had quite a lovely weekend, doing pretty much what I said I would: I read up on some French, went to the gym and embroidered "Mischief managed" on to my grocery bag.

That last part now feels like a rather good excuse to talk about Harry Potter. And frankly, one should never pass up a chance to talk about Harry Potter.





I've been addicted to Harry Potter ever since I started reading the books at fourteen, ten years ago. I remember realizing that I'll be in my twenties when the final movie airs - and then adding, "but I'll probably have outgrown the whole phenomenon by then". Oh, how wrong I was!




The thing is though, I have kind of outgrown the books. I've read them so, so many times over. And to be honest, even though the main storyline is obviously great, I was always interested mainly in the subplots. The marauders, the people in the Order of the Phoenix, the village dymanics of Hogsmeade, the Weasley twins and their crowd... These were the things that really triggered my imagination.

To be honest: even though I no longer read the books, I do find myself drifting of into Harry Potter-related daydreams ever so often. I simply love the HP universe, the aestethics of the films, the magic itself and the well-written characters. Oh, and the fact that it fuels other peoples creativity as well - as proven by all the parodies, the photo montages, the hilariousness.




Well, I'm off now. I need to drop by Flourish and Blotts to pick up Spellman's Syllabary for my Ancient Runes class.

The List

On this beautiful blog, I found a lovely list of "theoretically achievable things", little dreams to fulfill and goals to strive towards. I've made several different versions of this list myself before, and if I were to make one right now, it would look like this:

1. Buy some really beautiful, boudoir-ish sleepwear (just for the fun of it)

2. Do backstage work at a play
3. Rent a little beach house somewhere warm
4. Translate a novel from English
5. Find a local pub or café to truely feel at home in
6. Actually write a book
7. Work abroad for a year or two
8. Take a proper roadtrip with friends
9. Become fluent in French
10. Walz with someone who really knows how to (once again)
11. Change my hairstyle
12. Go stargazing with someone who loves it just as much as I do
13. Throw an outdoors autumn party like this:

So that last thing might not happen - I just adore that picture - but those other things could actually happen at some point. The point of making these lists, to me, is not to frantically start working towards all these dreams, but just to remind myself that they are still there, if you know what I mean. It's so easy to lose sight of them and start focusing way too much on everyday life. Right now, numbers 1. and 9. are definitely the easiest for me to work on, so I guess I'll start with those...:)

On the list that inspired me to write my own, there was this one thing that I especially liked: "Read aloud with someone I really love". That is such a wonderfully theatralic, Jane Austen-y thing to do, and I feel like noone ever does that anymore. I definitely want to, some day.

A river's disguise

Now in Wienna, there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry

It's friday evening, Leonard Cohen is singing softly in the background and my first week of classes is behind me. It really exhausted it more than it should - thank goodness for weekends. Mine will be spent drawing (I'm really inspired by amusement parks and vintage circus pictures right now, and I'd like to channel that into some pencil sketches) attending an aerobics class (I've really been waiting to get back into my workout routine after the summer holidays - I definitely need to!) and brushing up on my French grammar in order to stand a chance in my advanced French class.

Take this walz, take this walz
Take its broken waist in your hand

Plus I need to figure out if there's anything I can do to make my study feel more like an actual apartment and less like, well, a room. I've lived here for tree years now, and during my first year here I had blood red curtains, a dark red comforter on my bed and a red carpet. I loved it for about a year, then I got super tired of it and gradually changed it into what it looks like now: white and slightly romantic, with a beautiful old lamp and black-and-white photos on the walls. Still, it feels more like a bedroom than an actual apartment, if you know what I mean.

I've actually loved the cozy dorm room feeling this study has ever since I moved in, but now I'm all of a sudden longing for something, well, more home-like. Decluttering it a bit and removing some old pictures might help, I guess. Any ideas are extremely welcome!

I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise...

To-Do-List on the fifth of September:

-Start planning thesis
-Go to the store, get sesame seeds
-Pay rent (urgent!)
-Go pick up book from library
-Start blogging

Well, that's one down then!