Day 1507: A fucking shit day

Last week I had what can only be described as a "fucking shit day".

In England, when you have a fucking shit day, the remedy is to tell everybody about your fucking shit day, and revel in the sympathy that comes in the form of other people telling you about their fucking shit days. You all laugh together about how some days that you think are going to be normal days SUDDENLY turn into fucking shit days! Through this cleansing ritual, everybody purges. The cathartic venting of the fucking shit days leaves you feeling ready to face the next fucking shit day.

This is not what I have experienced in Sweden.

If you tell people about your fucking shit day, one of two things will happen. Either:

1. You will get a lot of "Åh nej, vad synd" (oh no, what a shame) which is probably heartfelt, but coming from a culture in which people don't really express their sympathy through high-pitched pleasantries, everything just sounds diabolically fake.

2. Uncomfortable body posture and rapid subject change. Fucking shit days are shit, nobody wants to think about them right? Quick, make the person who had a fucking shit day feel better by not thinking about it!

After my venting of this particular fucking shit day went catastrophically off the rails, I got to thinking about exactly why Swedish people are so uncomfortable in taking solace in the fact that other people's days are just as fucking shitty as their own.

And I couldn't help but think about how every fucking shit day, or every fucking shit facet of every fucking shit day, is often turned into a thinly veiled but totally ridiculous positive aspect. Like when my driving instructor looked at the rain lashing against the windshield through a foggy grey haze of blääääää and suddenly came out with "Oh fantastic! Now it's autumn!" I was so thrilled that she was using a bit of sarcasm I actually laughed! Until she followed up with "time to light the candles, wear comfy clothes and get cosy at home!" and I realised she was being totally unironic.

I constantly wonder how people here are able to sustain hours long conversation about running and going to the gym, when those are, realistically, obligatory time devourers that detract from ACTUAL HOBBIES and PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT. But now it completely makes sense, doing repetitive exercise is so dull that it must be MAGICALLY TRANSFORMED into a positive, lest people actually start discussing something negative and we all have to get uncomfortably shifty and change the subject of conversation. So now we all have to talk about how great it feels when to have "träningsvärk" (training aches) and how some shoes that somebody purchased for running are so himla fina (blooming lovely).

Look at IKEA. Everybody knows that it's actually Dante's undiscovered next layer of hell going round the place, but somehow couples and families make a day out of it. What better representation of the Swedish ability to put a happy face on a dog turd is there than the global effect of IKEA. "Oh we have to go and spend money on crappy furniture to fill our home with utilitarian things, instead of buying all the cool shit we though we could have as kids when we imagined being adults and having money!! Yaaaaay! Let's clap our hands everybody and buy some sub-par, poor quality lingonberry jam!" Cue several hours of dead time looking at a mock up of a house you'll never have, followed by getting home and pretending you've accomplished something.

The big dream of most Swedish people is family life, why has nobody here got the message that family life is basically the epitome of drudgery? Oh wait - they have got that message, and they relish the challenge. If anyone can make the shitty nappy changing, weekly food shopping, temper tantrum throwing, super stressed school running, never ending laundry doing, relentless time slipping, constant lack of sleep giving destroyer of personal life dreams that is family life into a super happy fun time, it's got to be Swedish people.

If you're going to have a family, at least revel in the joy of sharing how shitty that makes you feel with other people. If the time you have to spend burning calories is greater than the time you spent enjoying the consumption of calories, at least burn a few of them in a circle jerk of anger with other people who feel the same. And if you have a fucking shit day of any kind, it is your privilege - nay! it is your RIGHT to have your shit day affirmed, confirmed and appreciated by fellow shit day havers.

Otherwise you might end up like my old neighbours; your anger (that you thought was magically transformed into joy) just bubbling up inside, ultimately culminating in you throwing plates at your partner during a blazing row at 4am. Then again, people in adjacent flats listening through the walls probably just told themselves: Oh nice! Now they have less washing up to do.

Day 1364: Always drive on the right side of life

In Sweden people drive on the right side of the road. Which is to say they drive on the wrong side of the road. As an experienced passenger I know all to well the confusion of striding purposefully towards the left hand door, opening it with flair and finding a wheel and some pedals that shouldn't be there. Having done this 1,704,720,347 times, it is perhaps now my turn to start reciprocating to all those people who have motioned me to the other side of the car and ferried me across the country (or, more often, home from the pub. You tha real MVP).

Today in my first lesson for 10 years it all came back to me; how to find the biting point between the accelerator and clutch, how to shift gear with your left hand, how to position the car in the left hand lane after a turn, how to use the cars on the left hand side to help you position the car and how to always keep going on a main road and don't stop for cars on small side roads. Oh no, wait. That's not AT ALL how you drive here.

First of all my new fangled car doesn't need you to press the accelerator AT ALL to find the biting point, it starts moving by itself when you release the pedal. Then there's the gear shift, obviously that's not AT ALL on the left. As for positioning the car on the left after a turn, don't do that AT ALL unless colliding with large oncoming objects is your kind of fun. And okay, I didn't really struggle with these things, they're mostly for comedy value, but the priority to the right rule (högreregeln)? That's not a thing AT ALL in England.

In England if you're driving on a main road then you've got the right of way. If you're driving on a side road and you approach a main road, then you have to wait for traffic on the main road to stop before you can progress. Simple. But not here. Not everywhere that isn't England apparently. Here you have to have CONSTANT VIGILANCE against pesky cars, trucks, vans, bikes, UFOs, trailers, caravans, camels, horses, husky sleds, snowmobiles and amphibious craft from the right. And a myriad of signs that could potentially tell you to do otherwise.

Besides the troublesome priority-to-the-right rule, the other big obstacle is the language. Sitting in a meeting, lecture, class conversation group or coffee shop and communicating in Swedish is all well and good. Trying to grasp the intricacies of some instructions containing 3 new words that you have to guess from context while simultaneously looking in 3 mirrors, pressing two pedals, manipulating a gearbox and watching for oncoming traffic is an interesting new stretch of my mental multitasking capacity. Many times when something unexpected happened I automatically started speaking in English. Kudos to all those who don't have the luxury of a global language as their default setting and who manage to translate their outbursts to the correct language.

I suppose I'd better get back to learning some things for the theory test (what should you do if you hit a moose?) and dreading spinning around on the halkbana, a slippery road mimicking ice that you have to pass a test on. Wish me luck...