Day 2215: Dual Wield

As of April I have two nationalities, British and Swedish. I always used to envy people with two nationalities, like they were exotic. But now I am one of them it all feels a bit odd. I am an imposter! I don't feel Swedish. Actually I don't really feel British any more, either. Maybe that's what it really means to be a citizen of multiple places; not belonging neatly in any of them. Some people have three or more citizenships. I imagine this to be a bit like Voldemort's horcruxes, the more you have, the more you dilute your original self. 

Of course becoming a citizen of multiple places doesn't involve murdering people to split your soul in pieces so that the Swedish part can reside in an old goblet. It's always best not to follow the allegory train too far down the track. To the depot of surrealism. In actuality there are many positive sides to being a dual citizen, having a wider world view, meeting new people, trying a different job market, being equally as baffled by politics but this time in a different constellation, not needing a visa for some journeys, rubbing the new leathery sheen of your European passport in your worried remainer friends' faces...WHO DOES THAT?! Not me.

While the horcrux idea might sound a bit negative, becoming a dual citizen is not a happy fun time party. You have to live a long time in a country where you don't understand all the words in the sentences being said and you have to do a lot of smiling and nodding that occasionally ends with eight people waiting for a response to a question that sailed over your head. You have to leave your friends and family who know you very well and construct a foreigner personality, which is a bit like a plastic veneer that gets kind of brownish age scum over time, and latch on to other foreigner personalities who eventually turn into friends who bond with you over mutual WTF? about the new place you all live in. You have to navigate guilt feelings like a fucking rally driver every time you visit home and nobody wants you to leave. Actually sometimes you wonder yourself why you are leaving. You must endure nobody getting your joke references to 90's British TV shows. Even if you meet other British people they probably didn't grow up in exactly the same time/place bubble as you and they don't know about the time everyone thought Neil Buchannan from Art Attack was dead but it was just a stupid internet rumor or that time when Peter Andre overdosed on bananas or that time Brian Harvey from E17 ate too many jacket potatoes and ran over his own head with a car. Conversely you also start using new culturalisms in the old motherland and nobody understands why you're crooning "Jaaa. aaa. aaa. aaaa." like a seal, or wearing birkenstocks around the house, or covering your ears with your hands when a tube train approaches or an ambulance drives past.

That's not to mention the beaurocratic hell involved in being a dual citizen. Jobs and institutions don't understand your foreign education and likewise people back "home" (except it's not any more) don't understand the new paperwork from Foreignland. When you apply for citizenship it costs money and it costs what can only be described as a fucktonne, that's 2000 fuckpounds in USA parlance, of time. My application took 17 months. It should have taken longer but the Swedish foreign office panicked on the originally scheduled Brexit date in March and rushed it through. Friends from other countries are at 20 months and counting. The current time estimate for process is 3 years. Some friends who are abroad were rejected for being abroad, despite handing their application in years ago when they were not abroad. Whoever processed my application wanted a year's worth of payslips for my 6th year of residency, even though I became eligible for citizenship at 4 years. The process itself is a great mystery, the level of professionalism and expediency displayed by the foreign office suggests a great deal of divination by moose entrails and casting of 5-kronor coins into the mälaren for luck.

At the end of all the difficulty though, it is extremely rewarding to be able to dissasociate yourself from the worst of both countries by brazenly waving your alternate passport in the air and yelling "I don't live there!"

Day 1472: 4 Years in Sweden

Four years ago, on Saturday 10th August 2013, I moved to Sweden.

And four years ago to the day, on Wednesday 21st August 2013 I received my person number, making me an official part of the Swedish machine and able to pay my kronor to the män.

Looking back at my old blog posts is quite interesting for me, it makes me reflect on how much is so completely normal now that I would not even notice, let alone write a post about.

Here's a trip down my memory lane.

1. Public Art

In some of my earliest posts I wrote some comments about the "strange" public art around, usually derisively. In London there is a total lack of public art in public spaces (although sometimes there is poetry on the tube!) so they really stood out. Now I don't even notice the public art and that's quite sad! Instead I notice how shit everywhere else is without really being able to put my finger on why it's shit...

2. The eternal struggle of the laundry room

In my old flat the laundry room was a novelty in the beginning of my living here and it became a convenience - multiple washing machines at once! A big room to dry clothes! Several dryers! A mangle (that I'll never use) !!! And so socialist, surely it's much better for the environment that everyone shares rather than each person having a private machine?

Well now I live in a new, much bigger, building and Fuck That. I want my own machine! I want to have a clean fluff filter on my dryer that doesn't make my clothes dusty! I want my clothes to dry for as long as they need without running downstairs to hastily grab everything still damp from the drying cupboard so the next wanker can use it! I want to wash after 10 bloody PM if I bloody well feel like it! And most of all, oOoohh most of all, I want to avoid the wash slot booking system that the residents association fucked up and left 3 people with 1 key to the same booking mechanism, so that my booked time is randomly moved around the booking board and makes me believe I am developing Alzheimers because I think I've forgotten which time I booked.

3. Passive Aggressive Swedes

Honestly this is something I've never been a fan of, as my four year old post will attest. I am perpetually amazed by the Swedish dedication to packing their rage down into a decrepit corner of themselves before either a) blasting it out in a well penned note or b) not doing that, and randomly exploding at service personnel in an uncontrolled immense offload that usually has no sense of proportion in relation to the minor or imagined injustice they witnessed.

I'm learning how to drive, and I recently pulled out in front of a fast moving Volvo because I had the right of way. The Volvo did not think I had the right of way and beeped at me. I thought nothing of it because I am a learner and learners make mistakes, but my instructor was worried. Why was she worried? Because very often, drivers who feel slighted by being made to slow down for 2 seconds of their day by a learner will sit on that RAAAAAAGE all the livelong day until they make it to a computer where they will write that well-penned letter and report the driving school for malpractice. Who has that much time and energy to waste being angry all day at a FUCKING SHIT LEARNER DRIVER? Swedish people with comfortable lives and no real problems, that's who.

4. Drinking

I saw some beer in a school and I thought it was because Swedes like to kick back.


No.

Beer is drunk by the following categories of Swedes:

• Old/Middle aged men who drink Pripps Blå with lunch (a korv med bröd or a hamburger) because that's what they've been doing since the 70's and they never got the memo about bowel cancer
• Youth who get fucked up on Friday and Saturday, usually other days too,  live only for that, and hang around in obnoxious groups passive aggressively saying snide comments to passers by but never actually doing anything serious
•  20-30 somethings who say they like fun, but they will make penance for their beer by running or going to the gym every god damn day, so that they only thing they actually have to talk about while drinking beer is how they went running. Repeat ad infinitum

5. Knäckebröd

I commented early on that knäckebröd tastes like cardboard, now I quite like it. I still can't spread butter like a Swede, though.

6. So. Many. Candles

Of all my blog posts, I think I spent the most time researching not one, but two lists of names for candles in this country. I have only continued to be amazed by how much people love them, have them lit for no reason, how many shops are dedicated to them and how important they are for the concept of "mys" (cosy). I can probably not remember all of their names now by heart, but I definitely own a lot of them. I don't light them. Why are they here? How did they get here? A mystery.

7. Language Skillz

Two years ago I passed a TISUS test and recieved a qualification in Swedish language that allows me to study courses in Swedish, and convert my English teaching qualification to the Swedish system.

I am an avid reader in English, an avid speaker in English and, clearly, an avid writer of random crap among other things. I'm even an avid teacher of English! I am none of these things in Swedish, I am not the same person in Swedish. And I never will be.

Do I think I was actually good at Swedish two years ago? No. Do I think I'm good at Swedish now? No. But the system thinks I'm good enough and that's worth a lot to me.

8. Nature

I've really enjoyed being closer to nature here than I ever have been in England, and I'm not even a huge outdoorsy type. I've blogged about being able to ice skate on frozen rinks in winter, about going to the forest to pick berries,  about seeing the northern lights and about picking enough apples to make my own cider! I've now made too much cider and am officially SICK OF IT how cool is that!!?!? Time for a new project... Beer?

9. Etiquette 

Yep, I'm still learning. But I'm getting the hang of it, as one of my better liked posts can attest.

10. The Future?

Sometimes I complain about things, we all do. But overall I have it good here in Swedenland and I'm really grateful. When I look at my old blog posts it's obvious I've had a learning curve, a really nice one, learning a new language, getting to like new food, seeing some amazing places, benefiting from the high quality of home life and work life, meeting new friends.

It is interesting, and sad, to feel more detached from my old home and more attached to my new one, while forever feeling that I don't really belong in either any more.

I don't write about politics much on my blog because that's not my bag, baby. However this is as good a time as any to note that fascism is on the rise everywhere and it just doesn't make sense to an immigrant like me.

There are a lot of people who have left one place and moved to another, who feel like they've been moulded into something new that doesn't quite fit into a preassigned, nationalism-shaped hole and drop down into the waiting box of a homogeneous society.
And if I with my English stereotypes am feeling a bit like I've slipped between the cracks of two nations into the arsecrevice of uncertainty that this metaphor turned into, then I can't even begin to imagine how people whose original culture is nothing like the Swedish one must feel.

Anyone from elsewhere who can make sense of this much darkness, cold, passive-aggressive, self absorbed, gym-obessessed, well designed, self-congratulatory, individualistic yet somehow socialist perfectness, you da real MVP.

Day 1321: Aborting the abortion of abortion education

In January 2017 I read that Trump's administration were passing a Regan era rule that every Republican government has passed upon coming into office. The Mexico City policy, or the global gag rule, means that any charity awarded funding from the United States can't even so much as mouth the word "abortion" when engaging in overseas family planning without losing all of said funding.

Without delving into all the reasons why properly funded and carefully offered advice about abortions saves thousands of impoverished and uneducated women around the world every year, I'm just going to say that of all the myriad shitty things I read about the world while trying to avoid reading anything at all, I was particularly depressed about this one. How can I, a single individual, possibly try to counteract the sweeping loss of funding caused by this rule? Why did I care so much? Well, because I value and am thankful for all the freedoms I experience as a Swedish citizen and I wish that all the women who experience seven tonnes of shit in their lives every day could have even just a fraction of the freedoms I enjoy.

I almost went off into my dark place to brood about the untold evils of this world, until I read that the Netherlands would work to actively combat the loss of funding caused by the withdrawal of American aid to family planning clinics. And then, Lo and Behold, Sweden also got involved. As did Denmark and Belgium. It is undoubtedly a delicious feeling when you meet a fellow person who shares your views, but to know that whole countries with large numbers of people felt the same as I did upon reading of the reinstatement of the gag rule and WANTED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT is pretty fucking sweet. Some people alone can't make America sized money grants, but some countries together can make much more of a difference.

The Swedish national society for sexual education (yes - it's a thing!) sent out public information about the change in US policy and gave instructions on how to donate. Even though I'm not a big fan of charity (since really philanthropy is just rich assholes being benevolent with their hoards to causes they believe in) this particular charitable donation, if used to help women learn about and have access to safe abortion, sends a very clear "fuck you" to the rich asshole who doesn't want money spent on such things. And that is one "fuck you" message I am happy to spend my money on.