My Other Blog...
A long time ago, I said I would start a blog where I review the books I read. Somehow, I never got around to it. Today, however, I finally managed to start it. The other blog is called Kim Talks Books and you can find it at http://kimtalksbooks.wordpress.com.
No, I am not abandoning this blog. I will still update this one at least once or twice a month (maybe more, depending on how I feel).
So go to my new book review blog and give me suggestions for how to improve it. I am still a novice at this stuff. :)
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Has Summer Moved On?
For the first time in a long time, we had warm, glorious weather in Stockholm for nearly five weeks without interruption. The temperature was moderate by American standards (roughly 80-85F) and sunny. And despite the fact that nearly everyone in Stockholm was out sunbathing or just simply enjoying the weather, nearly every Stockholmer I met couldn't prevent themselves from complaining about how hot it was (most unanimously agreed it was too hot, I thought it was just right) and moaned about wanting it to rain so the air would cool off.
Well, they got their wish.
It started raining on Saturday, and it's been raining on-and-off since then. According to the weather prognosis, we can expect more of the same well into next week. Now all those people who wished for rain are going around complaining about the very rain they wanted. I tell them, "You have yourselves to blame. You wanted rain..."
I don't like the rain--I know we need it, but Stockholm when it's raining is a depressing city. A nasty low pressure system smothers the city in murky clouds. Blech!
For the first time in a long time, we had warm, glorious weather in Stockholm for nearly five weeks without interruption. The temperature was moderate by American standards (roughly 80-85F) and sunny. And despite the fact that nearly everyone in Stockholm was out sunbathing or just simply enjoying the weather, nearly every Stockholmer I met couldn't prevent themselves from complaining about how hot it was (most unanimously agreed it was too hot, I thought it was just right) and moaned about wanting it to rain so the air would cool off.
Well, they got their wish.
It started raining on Saturday, and it's been raining on-and-off since then. According to the weather prognosis, we can expect more of the same well into next week. Now all those people who wished for rain are going around complaining about the very rain they wanted. I tell them, "You have yourselves to blame. You wanted rain..."
I don't like the rain--I know we need it, but Stockholm when it's raining is a depressing city. A nasty low pressure system smothers the city in murky clouds. Blech!
Chica Chats
When I first moved here to Sweden, I didn't have many female friends. I think this was in part due to my trying to make as many Swedish friends as possible and realzing that this was sometimes an impossible task. What I didn't know when I first moved to Sweden was that most people have their clique of friends whom they've known since childhood and are loath to include members in said clique--unless you are the partner of someone within the clique. So, while you may work with them everyday and have lunch and go to after-works with them, they'll rarely ever invite you to their barbecues or dinner parties. Now, keep in mind, this is all based on my experience--which is pretty old now since I moved here in 1995 and I am thinking of that time period between 1995 and 1997 when I really wanted female friends (I had a great bunch back in Richmond and Philadelphia and I missed them all). Instead, my closest friends during that period were an Australian, an American with a Swedish name and an Irishman. It took three years for me to finally make enough female friends that I felt like now I had a nice group to hang out with. And in the beginnig, only one was a Swede, and she didn't hang out with us that often. Nearly all the girls who became the Chicas were from somewhere else and all of them had moved here because of a Swede or some other European who was living in Sweden and lured them here thanks to love.
Fast forward ten or eleven years to now and the main group of Chicas includes Maitechu, Sara, Nadia, Julie and Alessandra. There are a few peripheral members who drift in and out at leisure. There's one who's been axed from my list of chicas but is still included in the others' list, which on occasion has made things tense but she hardly ever associates with any of us anyway so it doesn't really affect us very much anymore.
In the past we Chicas met nearly every day. We'd congregate in cafés, restaurants and bars. We'd have pot luck at one another's apartments, we'd have movie nights. If you saw one, you were bound to see at least two others. Then something happened--yes, what inevitably happens when you have women in their late 20s-early 30s--they all started having kids. At first, this didn't affect things so very much. We still met quite often; we just had to base things around baby sleeping/feeding schedules. And this usually worked. But as the number of babies in the group increased, it became more difficult to find places with enough space for all of us, plus wee ones, plus wee ones' baby carriages.
I was the odd one out. I didn't have kids. Initially, not by choice. We'd tried, but it didn't work. There were early-term miscarriages. The desire to have a baby began to feel like it was killing our relationship--sex is no longer fun when you are only doing it because you're ovulating, it begins to feel like a chore that must be got through. And when you treat your husband like an on-demand sperm donor and not the guy you love, it just leads to problems. Plus, there was the little glitch that he was no longer sure he wanted to have kids. After over a year of trying, we gave up. We both realized we liked our life together as it was, even if it meant we would never have our own children. Trying to explain that to people was not always easy. But that is another story.
One thing I noticed with the arrival of so many kids was how the nature of our Chicaness changed. Suddenly we weren't these carefree women with careers and husbands/boyfriends who got together to talk about anything and everything. My friends were turning into moms who talked about their kids and kind of forgot that those of us who didn't have kids wanted to sometimes talk about something else. There were times when I opted out of meeting for coffees or pot-lucks because I was tired of being asked to admire ad nauseum someone's baby or agree that their child was the most wonderful/intelligent/fill-in-your-fave-adjective child in the world. At first, I didn't say anything. I thought this would pass. But when it didn't, and I was becoming more and more...not anti-social but anti-social-if-all-we-were-going-to-do-was hang-out-in-a-playground-all-day...well, I realized I had to say something. I loved my Chicas' kids; I didn't love not being able to talk to my friends because it was non-stop babytalk. I also didn't love sometimes being treated like my problems weren't real problems simply because I didn't have children.
So I told them how it felt. Most of them understood and realized that they sometimes went overboard with the baby stuff. One friend got annoyed and felt like she shouldn't have to avoid talking about what was the most important thing that had happened to her just because I didn't want to hear about it all the time. I had to remind her I didn't want her to stop talking about how great motherhood was for her. I just wanted her to occasionally talk about something else too. So for a couple of years, it was weird. I started doing things on my own because I didn't feel like trying to organize things around baby carriages or playgrounds.
Now the kids are getting older (a few new ones have arrived, one more on the way) and it's a little easier to meet. We don't see each other everyday like we used to but lately we've been trying to meet at least once a week so we can touch bases and reaffirm our Chicaness. Sometimes these meetings are kids-free, sometimes they aren't. But it's nice to have found a way back to one another even if we will probably never have that carefreeness that we had when we all first started hanging out together. But the nice thing about when we meet is that we talk, we give each other support, we are like sisters (or the sisters we wish we had).
Yesterday we had a nice chica chat at Vurma on Birger Jarlsgatan. It was one of those chica meetings that happens quite quickly and everythign falls into place very smoothly. Outside it was raining cats and dogs, but it was lovely to sit by the open window and feel the breeze, talk about our lives and enjoy good salads and sandwiches. While we were sitting there, I had this image of all of in our 60s, meeting, laughing, and being the same group of Chicas...it will be nice to grow old with these Chicas. :)
When I first moved here to Sweden, I didn't have many female friends. I think this was in part due to my trying to make as many Swedish friends as possible and realzing that this was sometimes an impossible task. What I didn't know when I first moved to Sweden was that most people have their clique of friends whom they've known since childhood and are loath to include members in said clique--unless you are the partner of someone within the clique. So, while you may work with them everyday and have lunch and go to after-works with them, they'll rarely ever invite you to their barbecues or dinner parties. Now, keep in mind, this is all based on my experience--which is pretty old now since I moved here in 1995 and I am thinking of that time period between 1995 and 1997 when I really wanted female friends (I had a great bunch back in Richmond and Philadelphia and I missed them all). Instead, my closest friends during that period were an Australian, an American with a Swedish name and an Irishman. It took three years for me to finally make enough female friends that I felt like now I had a nice group to hang out with. And in the beginnig, only one was a Swede, and she didn't hang out with us that often. Nearly all the girls who became the Chicas were from somewhere else and all of them had moved here because of a Swede or some other European who was living in Sweden and lured them here thanks to love.
Fast forward ten or eleven years to now and the main group of Chicas includes Maitechu, Sara, Nadia, Julie and Alessandra. There are a few peripheral members who drift in and out at leisure. There's one who's been axed from my list of chicas but is still included in the others' list, which on occasion has made things tense but she hardly ever associates with any of us anyway so it doesn't really affect us very much anymore.
In the past we Chicas met nearly every day. We'd congregate in cafés, restaurants and bars. We'd have pot luck at one another's apartments, we'd have movie nights. If you saw one, you were bound to see at least two others. Then something happened--yes, what inevitably happens when you have women in their late 20s-early 30s--they all started having kids. At first, this didn't affect things so very much. We still met quite often; we just had to base things around baby sleeping/feeding schedules. And this usually worked. But as the number of babies in the group increased, it became more difficult to find places with enough space for all of us, plus wee ones, plus wee ones' baby carriages.
I was the odd one out. I didn't have kids. Initially, not by choice. We'd tried, but it didn't work. There were early-term miscarriages. The desire to have a baby began to feel like it was killing our relationship--sex is no longer fun when you are only doing it because you're ovulating, it begins to feel like a chore that must be got through. And when you treat your husband like an on-demand sperm donor and not the guy you love, it just leads to problems. Plus, there was the little glitch that he was no longer sure he wanted to have kids. After over a year of trying, we gave up. We both realized we liked our life together as it was, even if it meant we would never have our own children. Trying to explain that to people was not always easy. But that is another story.
One thing I noticed with the arrival of so many kids was how the nature of our Chicaness changed. Suddenly we weren't these carefree women with careers and husbands/boyfriends who got together to talk about anything and everything. My friends were turning into moms who talked about their kids and kind of forgot that those of us who didn't have kids wanted to sometimes talk about something else. There were times when I opted out of meeting for coffees or pot-lucks because I was tired of being asked to admire ad nauseum someone's baby or agree that their child was the most wonderful/intelligent/fill-in-your-fave-adjective child in the world. At first, I didn't say anything. I thought this would pass. But when it didn't, and I was becoming more and more...not anti-social but anti-social-if-all-we-were-going-to-do-was hang-out-in-a-playground-all-day...well, I realized I had to say something. I loved my Chicas' kids; I didn't love not being able to talk to my friends because it was non-stop babytalk. I also didn't love sometimes being treated like my problems weren't real problems simply because I didn't have children.
So I told them how it felt. Most of them understood and realized that they sometimes went overboard with the baby stuff. One friend got annoyed and felt like she shouldn't have to avoid talking about what was the most important thing that had happened to her just because I didn't want to hear about it all the time. I had to remind her I didn't want her to stop talking about how great motherhood was for her. I just wanted her to occasionally talk about something else too. So for a couple of years, it was weird. I started doing things on my own because I didn't feel like trying to organize things around baby carriages or playgrounds.
Now the kids are getting older (a few new ones have arrived, one more on the way) and it's a little easier to meet. We don't see each other everyday like we used to but lately we've been trying to meet at least once a week so we can touch bases and reaffirm our Chicaness. Sometimes these meetings are kids-free, sometimes they aren't. But it's nice to have found a way back to one another even if we will probably never have that carefreeness that we had when we all first started hanging out together. But the nice thing about when we meet is that we talk, we give each other support, we are like sisters (or the sisters we wish we had).
Yesterday we had a nice chica chat at Vurma on Birger Jarlsgatan. It was one of those chica meetings that happens quite quickly and everythign falls into place very smoothly. Outside it was raining cats and dogs, but it was lovely to sit by the open window and feel the breeze, talk about our lives and enjoy good salads and sandwiches. While we were sitting there, I had this image of all of in our 60s, meeting, laughing, and being the same group of Chicas...it will be nice to grow old with these Chicas. :)
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