Crude

Recently I updated myself on the website of a German scandal sheet. There was this case of a kidnapped wife of a banker. After weeks of searching and desperates appeals of the family to the kidnappers to release her, the women was found dead. Apparently there had been a struggle with her kidnapper, who in the end stabbed her. Just imagine me reading this article, being very consternated, when a google advertisement on the right side of the article caught my attention: special offer on knife-blocks. How incredibly crude is this? Of course, those advertisements are not put there by another individual but rather automatically with the help of keywords and user profiles, however it feels very disturbing. Of course I should not take this too serious considering the kind of "newspaper" I was reading, which, by the way, is in itself already the most inappropriate sheet ever. But still I am taking the freedom to feel offended and disturbed by this crudeness.

Who is still saying that this was a goal???

Sorry this just had to be ;-) Of course this was a goal, no doubt about that!

Time for a change?

Sometimes it is easy to get the impression that all signs show the direction "leave your current location and start something new". The past few weeks have not been particularly easy, neither has been the decision to quit my job. End of last week someone broke in into my car and stole the radio and some other rather worthless things. Please note, that this is the third time in 3.5 years, that this happens to me! Yesterday I got a note from my landlord saying that there had been some problems and within three months I need to move out. This leaves me down with pretty much nothing: no job, no apartment, no reason to stay any longer in Sweden. I really try hard to think positive and think of the whole "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade of them" mantra, but it is admittedly becoming more and more difficult.

So if I am pretty much at a point, where I have to start all over again, it couldn't be any more of perfect timing to pack my backpack and go travel. Something that I really need right now is positive input and an adventure. More and more of my friends are also considering moving back to their homecountries. Ok, sure, in summer Sweden is beautiful, but the winters are a major downside.

I can already hear the voice of a friend saying "Oh you simply did not try hard enough" and everyone of our mutual friends also returned to their homecounties. In her opinion all those people are just too soft and gave up too early... which is easy to say if you do not have to worry moneywise and in terms of an apartment.

So if anyone of you has ideas where to travel to and experiences with making some money for survival abroad (preferably Central and South America), please do send me you suggestions!

Pensive

Wow, it has been quite a while since my last entry. In the meantime I actually managed to find a job and get a routine into my life. As it tends to be, you always want what you don't have. So I find myself counting down the days, as I quit my job. As it turns out, working as a marketing assistant was not really meant for me. I became more and more depressed, moody and simply sad. So I decided to take the consequences (rather early, I know, but better early than too late) and get back into my unstable life of temporary jobs, back to the doubts if I will ever find a job that I love and endless hours of application writing. Of course it can be considered unreasonable to quit a job before having found something else, but what are we living for if we are not happy. I feel like life's too short to be unhappy if it lies within my power to make myself happy again.

Don't get me wrong, I really want to work and I want to have a career but doesn't it always come down to timing? Maybe it was not meant for me yet, maybe discovering the world with an around the world ticket is what was meant for me now? Quitting this job, enjoying the summer and collecting energy for a new round of applications - who knows? However I KNOW that I made the right decision!

As disappointing as it might be to have found a job and figuring out, that it is the wrong one, the time spend in that job taught me a few things: 1. I still need to figure out a lot about myself; 2. I am not too old yet to travel around the world and enjoy being unbound; 3. There are WEIRD people out there! 4. With a cool head nearly everything can be solved.

Well of course there are many more things I found out but those seem like the most important ones to me. On top of those valuable lessons I had the pleasure to work with some truly amazing people and I am happy that I had the right timing to be working at the Embassy at the same time as them. Again, it is all about timing!

When working at a working place with some, mmmh, let's say "characters", the annoyance level can be very high, but so is the fun factor. Every person has a code name, so we have Mr. Chaplin (walks like him, behaves like them: a copy of the great Chaplin), Lasagne (as his English is on a level which does not allow a distinction "resigned" and "Lasagne"), MS (both initials and abbreviation for mouth smell), snake (unfortunately this person behaved quite back-stabbing) well and so on. Sometimes it was only one's self-control that prevented boiling blood shooting out of one's ears. At other times those character would make you cry from laughter.

For today I had booked an appointment at "The Studio", where they take amazing pictures of you after pampering you with make-up and hairstyling. Their catch-phrase is "Be a model for a day". I felt, if I am starting all over again with writing application, I need a new approach. And why not starting with giving myself an ego-boost? I was so sick of those application pictures on which I look like a 16-year old babysitter: innocent and trustworthy, babyface and not to be taken seriously. I spend hours in there and some pictures I actually like. I am unfortunately one of those people, that do not like the camera nor does the camera like me. In 90% of the pictures I close my eyes and the other pictures, well,... are mostly not that great either. Today I left with 4 pictures. Happy Svenja :-)

This weekend was also the royal wedding. Oh ho beautiful it was! Thousands of people where there, trying to catch a glimpse at the couple and I was lucky enough to see them. I don't know why this kinda corny stuff interests me so much, but when they said yes to each other, I was so touched. Such a beautiful wedding, (besides the tax money spend on it) it still felt down to earth and kinda simple, not as pompous as I expected, just nice.

Here is at least one picture, that I could shoot. As it turns out, my aiming skills are not the best ones, as 99% of the pictures show policemen and guards. Well done!

Lately I also started thinking about some people in particular. It is always difficult when one person's life changed in many ways while for another person everything stays more or less the same. This always creates tension. With some of my friends it works out perfectly fine, I can rely on them and they support me and vice-versa of course.
Some other people however showed a different face during the time when I started my job: jealousy, mean comments, back-stabbing, insults or simply childish behaviour like deleting the friendship on facebook for no apparent reason nor with an explanation. It has been pretty hurtful but apparently this is how it goes: living your life means also loosing touch with some people but it also means to strengthen the relationship to some other people and meeting new people. Loosing friends is always very hard on me but I also came to the conclusion that as long as you develop and want to become something/someone this is inevitable.
Those friendships that you describe with "man, this person has been my friend since early childhood" are extremely rare!

Well that's it for today!