sweden vs. norway

norwegians hate swedes in much the way canadians hate americans (or auburn football fans hate alabama):  they think they're stupid and that everything is an example of this.  most americans aren't aware of this at all.  i don't know if the same is true of sweden.  but we had a norwegian exchange student when i was 14 who gave my dad a tshirt with a row of swedish flags (five) and one norwegian one that says finn fem feil, find five mistakes.  this shirt is old and worn and paint-spotted by now, and no longer fits daddy, but mom happened to pull it from the store of old shirts to wear painting the entrance hall at our house yesterday.  that's when the fun started.

lillian, quietly: i thought you weren't going to wear that shirt anymore, mom.
mom:  i didn't go anywhere.
lillian: but you weren't going to wear it.
mom: i wasn't going to wear it out of the house.
lillian: NO that's NOT why you weren't going to wear it! (in an undertone, as if hoping i wouldn't hear) you said you wouldn't wear it because we know a swedish person now!  well, a finnish person who's kind of swedish!*

*wax_jism is a swedish finn--it's a 2% or 5% minority or something like that.  swedish is actually her native tongue.  she's not recently from sweden, although the swedish finn population is all concentrated together mostly, preserving its own unique culture and whatnot via a lot of inbreeding.

>.>

my ipod is in shanghai, but fedex has it.

lalala

my ipod has departed alaska.  i guess it's on either a plane or a truck somewhere.

cleaning/moving furniture today had a slight dust-up when it seemed the (quite low-brow, only 15" and 1220x768) monitor to our only 1.5-year-old dell had died.  it turned out a cable got loosened, and all is now hunky-dory. 

my throat still hurts and i've been chugging tea with lime and honey like crazy, and i bought some clinique face stuff and some clean and clear face stuff and my face feels wonderfully clean, and has stayed that way for hours, which it never does.

dude, packing is hard. 

i like ian thorpe, but i hate the way the announcers keep calling him "the Thorpedo."  shut the motherfucking bleeding fuck up, you brain-dead idiots.  michael whatsit is cute and not more than a little over the line of how much musculature i find pleasing to the eye, but there's just something... his claim that he wants only one medal seems disingenuous, but i could be reading into it.  he didn't seem as upset by the lower ones as others, perhaps, like australia in the relay, or us women's gymnastics (ouch.  but go romania!  the announcers' bias was really starting to wear towards the end.)

ikea dreams.

i like interior decorating enough that i might actually do it if (a) the schools weren't full of hopeless asses and (b) it paid well.  well, and (c) you didn't have to try to make designs other people like.  god, i hate that when i'm drawing lame little sketches--imagine it in a whole room.

(wax_jism doesn't have a bed, so one of the first things we have to do is buy one raid ikea.  it's good that we're going to be SO broke, i think, because once i got started with decorating i don't know how i would stop.)