Category: Life

  • Midsummer 2026

    Midsummer 2026

    I stepped outside today, in the most intense bout of instant regret I have had for a long time. Opening the front door was like stepping into the exhaust of a tumble dryer. Moist and hot, while windy.

    Smith is the heat-resistant person in our union, so he put on his work clothes and headed out to cut the lawn. I, on the other hand, with 75% of my genes literally stemming from the Arctic Circle, hissed loudly at the heat and hurried inside again, pug closely in tow.

    I went to my room and pug passed out beside me on the floor directly in the blasting air from the little AC we have in there. I can’t hear my own thoughts nontheless his calm snores over the AC, blasting for its life a couple of feet away, so I put on my headphones and loaded up my iPad with my morning entertainment. Unfortunately, it was a particularly bad day to have my headphones on, as egregious eating noises leaked out of them and into my horrified ears.

    Today’s episode from the reaction channel I’m watching on youtube contained a so called mukbang. Otherwise my favourite guilty pleasure – overweight trainwrecks getting criticism and a fair share of constructive advice from snarky gay men.

    It’s precisely what this overthinking, always 100mp/h running brain needs to balance itself out – just slow burn hours long streams with calm drama that I am absolutely not involved in in any way. The misophonia was screaming at the food noises in this particular episode but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s worth it. If I had watched the episode on the TV I wouldn’t have heard the noises at all over the AC. The irony isn’t lost on me.

    We celebrated Midsummer’s yesterday, calm and steady. Two friends came over and we BBQed and chitchatted for hours. We enjoyed the hot evening on the patio, kitted with insect nets of course. There is no other way of spending time outside in the evenings in these parts.

    We even found Swedish strawberries for a price that didn’t involve my husband’s firstborn. The time is out of joint!

    And you don’t need to worry like ya’ll internationals do ever since the movie Midsummer came out; there were no human sacrifices.

    I mean we’ve only made blood sacrifices during like two of my Midsummer’s, in all these 40 years on earth. The first one when I was a child, and my parent’s friends that owned the cabin we visited got two leeches in the lake. Ew.

    Yes humans, a blood sacrifice is welcome.

    The other time was 15 years ago when three of us was enacting life on an admirably cusiony lawn with drunk interpretative capoeira, and we all had to wash the accidental nosebleed we found ourselves covered in after the matches. We, of course, chose to do this in the lake seeing as it was light out and warm. Should we have been in a lake at 3 AM, not sober? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

    Did the blood sacrifice save us from certain death in the lake? Yes.

    Did the sacrifice also shelter us from the deathly glare from the neighbour looking out their window and seeing three bloodstained people climb their pontoon in the water? Probably.

    Here, in 2026, things are good as well. A lot more complicated, and there’s national thunder warnings looming in the distance.

    I will probably spend the day splayed out on the couch overthinking my creative projects and eating leftovers from the yesterday’s celebrations. I want to paint my project but the paint itself demands good ventilation and that means I would have to open a window or… go outside.

    … Yeah no.

  • National Pug-graphic

    National Pug-graphic

    Life’s weird.

    I’m standing outside in the, for this newly spring-awakened Swedish gremlin, blinding sun. Whisps of wind sweeping between the houses, passing by and ruffling my cardigan layers, because I refuse to wear a jacket. Layers are needed because the weather has a tendency to fall between sunny and sveltering (everything’s relative okay), or cloudy and freezing and the two are often separated by mere seconds for the entirety of April and May.

    Below me a steady sound, something like shchnorfrnnnmmpffff. The creature making the sound is my pug. My kind, dense pile of mashed potatoes that shadows me all my waking hours. What is displayed for me right now is a furry, busy butt with its cinnamon bun of a tail, wiggling as he’s deeply inhaling some scent that tickles his fancy. He turns to look at me, his little jaw vibrating from the hormonal load of the scent. There’s likely a female dog somewhere around these parts and she’s leaving post-it notes for everyone passing by these notice boards.

    The social media of dogs.

    You get an image of the leetle cinnamon bun because it’s beautiful, but I spare you the butthole because it is… not.

    I just calmly meet his gaze until he turns around again after establishing I’m not going anywhere and there’s absolutely nothing demanding his attention elsewhere, resuming his intense sniffling in a particular tuft of grass. I’ve been standing here for five minutes, I can stand here for five more if that’s what he wishes. By now we’re six years into walking, or more suiting – loitering, on walks with this more decorative than sporty piece of canine delight. We’re far into the abandonment of all hope that dog walks will raise even a smidge of a pulse, except for his when the Dog Billboard posts a female in heat.

    While I’ve been standing here keeping enough track of my potato to make sure he’s not eating something weird, I have let the other amount of my available thoughts wander, and I find myself just… chillin.

    No particularly measurable amount of anxiety, no stressing over either important or dumb shit, just standing around and being.

    While that sounds like an entirely reasonable way of experiencing standing around outside the house of an unfortunate person that has the most popular dog-sniffing place in this entire neighborhood, for me that feeling is so odd and so unusual at this time that it strikes me.

    I mean it’s nice, it’s something that I worked hard for, not entirely willingly. The universe has its way of forcing me into a corner so that I do what I need to do for my health or soul, because I’ve been stubbornly trying to survive in a way that isn’t right for me. After 40 years, those patterns are complicated to break.

    But now I’m just here, halfway into a budding magnolia tree with a schnorf on a leash, just hanging out.

    You get images of my blooming apple tree, as I didn’t have my phone with me to immortalise the magnolia

    I remember when I was some kind of mid-teen and had my first day, in years, not feeling really depressed. It almost frightened me then. I just walked around the makeup store in our local mall, looking at the same makeup that I’ve seen time and time again, but everything just felt so neutral. Just… like, being. It took a good while for me to recognise that the weird feeling stemmed from the lack of depression and that crushing weight of hopelessness and it weirded me out.

    Life has had its ups and downs since then. Today I don’t feel unsettled by the feeling of just chilling, it’s more like an reminder of something I experienced more often in my 20’s and that was much more of a distant memory in my 30’s. Being six months into being 40, maybe it’s time for a new era, ya know?

    Maybe I’ve just taken a five percent step closer to calm and a more healthy way of existing in this world, but for me it may be the most important five percents ever. Having a day of stillness here and there feels weird, and good.

    Don’t get me wrong, the little catastrophe goblin on the inside does inform me that “oh no, now we have MORE TO LOSE AND WE WILL!”; surely none of my ills has gone away.

    But today it kind of just settles in a little box that I can shuffle to the back instead of letting it spill onto my entire day, not splattering all over my thoughts. Nice!

    The last decade of my life has been a journey with twists and turns, and I have learned so very much, but I’ve also gotten wounded and carry the sore scars, not being able to really heal them. The soreness has been sneaking up on me, and it’s taken a while for me to catch how bad it’s actually gotten.

    The reason has been known for me for just two years. Like so many people out there I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to integrate my nervous system with what the society seems to value and expect, demand. It has led me further down the anxiety and hopelessness funnel, just like it has with so many other neurodivergent people out there.

    But along with my wounds, now I carry answers that I didn’t have two years ago.

    And I do find myself just chillin’, halfway into a magnolia tree. Progress.

  • The first post! Well, sort of

    The first post! Well, sort of

    Yes, this post is shamelessly taken from my oldnewishyetcancelledblogherewegoagain in 2024 because I can’t seem to get the hang of this thing called “sticking with it”. But it’s new times, new eras, new kinds of sortof-sanity now so here’s to hoping it’ll last this time! The post itself is equally meaningful and mirrors reality so I figure I’ll just use it again heheheheh.

    “As long as you have something to write and an audience eager to hear what you have to say, you can start a blog.”

    A cold shiver of dread shot through my system.

    Oh no! Does that mean I can’t start a blog? I had one for years, was that wrong?! Did I break the blogging rules? Did I miss the seminar where I learn how to manifest an audience before I even start writing? Dangit, I knew something was missing from my calendar in April. I was so proud of how organized I was!

    Well shucks, you are reading this so it’s too late now.

    corrects clothing *

    Ahem.

    Welcome to my blog! I totally have readers, they’re.. over there. No not there, -there-. It’s fine, I’ll show you later. But, now that you are here, I should introduce myself!

    You can call me Elle. I’m not anonymous -per se-, but I do prefer to be a bit discreet with my pure unadulterated identity – mostly because I have had a personal blog running between 2005 (livejournal, man) and 2018… and I do experience the paralyzing existential dread of being ridiculed for whatever I touch or express interests in for no particular reason as none of my interests are noteworthy really, this possibly being grounded in my traumatic childhood experiences of being an odd kid in a neurotypical world – but.. we’re… working on it?

    I by working on it I mean, like, actually working on it. Not getting paid of course – but the mental sweat, blood and tears are being squished out of my soul every day. It’s a journey, really! I would have started a travel blog but mental trip.. “aids” are illegal in my country, so here we are with just a personal one.

    A lovely picture of our puglet when he was little, just for good measure

    Anyway, I prefer to be a little bit mystical, let a touch of secrecy surround my little dwelling on this internet. I can write silly stuff on here and wrestle the angst-bear and hold it down long enough to click on the post-button, which is not possible if I can see my own face along with the text. If I do, I will start questioning everything and promptly be eaten by the bear. Terrible for SEO.


    Shortly before I realized I must have missed the seminar where I learn how to manifest an audience before starting the blog, I had a conversation with my husband. A conversation I’ve had about two times a year since 2018 when I kind of let the whole blogging thing slip for real.

    “Hey. Starting a new blog, is that a bad idea in 2024? With all the AI horrors rolling out unbeknownst to most people around the world, scraping robots throwing themselves over human made content (and to be completely fair, a lot of robot made content as well that’s out there already) to “learn” how to emulate humanity? Clickbait??”

    My husband Smith is my eternal enabler, and I’m so thankful for it.

    No honey, I’d say, if it makes you happy, do it!

    But drugs make people happy as well, not all things that make you happy is good for you!

    Smith just stared at me for a few seconds like he usually does when I’m being facetious.

    “You know what I mean.”

    You know what I mean as well!

    I don’t think you will get hunted down by human-eating robots because you have a blog in 2024. If we’re dying for AI-reasons, there’s for sure worse problems out there already.

    He scrolls silently and thoughtfully through the website he was reading when I interrupted him. “Can AI kill us all?” rolls past in bold letters.

    The other times we’ve had this conversation, we had like, life crippling and world-setting-on-fires-adjacent kind of events around us, which kind of harshed my vibes.

    But this time? Well, fuck it. If we’re dying anyways, might as well blog about it, right! The robots must have something to parse when we’re all gone, all the cat memes won’t do on their own, not to mention all the por..

    So! Here I find myself, in 2024 (and now 2026!), starting a personal blog again. We’ll see how we fare this time.

    Crippling existential dread and all.

    Welcome!