Oh, no :( Bad luck.
Today I lost or bit through a fixed broken tooth. In any case, I think it’s my remaining piece of tooth that has gone missing, not the stuff the dentist put in. So now I’m going to have a gap, fortunately not where it shows, but still.
Unfortunately, I just can’t go back to the dentist yet. Until the middle of February I’m all booked up with doctor’s and midwife’s appointments and similar stuff. I don’t feel up to going to any other place too.
🙁
Also, my sister’s run into a problem with getting my unfinished books out of my crashed old computer. She will need to order some new stuff because what she has doesn’t match my old computer. 🙁 This means I’m going to have to wait for at least a week, probably more before I can start finishing my works in progress.
Never question anyone’s beliefs no matter how silly
Today I thought of something that happened some years ago.
I had a friend, who was – well, a lot of things, actually, that I’m not going to go into here, but he was incidentally a little famous for a while, and among other things he was adopted from India.
He told me he came from a hospital run by Mother Teresa. I actually believed that, since he is about, I think – we’ve lost touch – about 38 years old today. That is if his parents were told the correct age for him at the time of adoption (six months). I’ve read that they always pick an age that is as low as possible, to make the child seem more attractive, adoptable and lovable. He could easily have been malnourished and a year old, or even older than that, but I didn’t say anything about that, since what would be the point?
He also told me the reason he had horrible scars on his neck. They were the result of a so called operation against tb. He added with scorn, you know, India in the 1970’s. Well, of course I didn’t, but I find it a little hard to believe that India in general had that level of superstition in the hospitals. I can believe that a superstitious, illiterate person not working for a hospital might have thought an ‘operation’ like that could – I don’t know – release evil spirits? – but not anything connected to anyone with any education. Even in India in the 1970’s. If you’re older than me and know something about India, feel free to correct me, if I’m wrong.
What I got in trouble over, was this:
He also had this quaint little myth about his origins. One of the nurses offered his parents a cute little story about how he came from a maharaja’s harem (against a little extra payment, naturally). His birth mother supposedly died in childbirth and no one wanted to take care of a baby boy whose mother had died. Really? A maharaja would get rid of a son for such a reason? Foolishly, I told him what I was thinking. Knowing what I know now, I would never have said anything about that either.
He didn’t like my suggestion one bit. A bit later – maybe the next day – he called me up and kept me on the phone for hours, scolding me and trying to prove to me that I was wrong and he was right about his past.
Naturally, I didn’t change my mind, and I told him something along those lines afterwards. Mainly something like: I hope you’re feeling better now. And he seemed to get my meaning. Nothing was accomplished, more than me getting pissed off with him and maybe him feeling a little better for standing up for his myth.
So at least I learned something from that incident. Never question anyone’s fundamental beliefs, even in something extremely silly if you’d take the time to analyse the belief.
More whining
Today I was supposed to go to the new maternity care center (that is in the new town). Though I’m very healthy this time around compared to the last time, I have had quite a run of bad luck when it comes to my appointments at clinics, hospitals and maternity care centers. First of all, it always takes about three weeks to get an appointment. Secondly, the hospital with the specialist maternity care can’t let me sign up as a patient (though apparently they can see me anyway). The last time I was supposed to be going to the ordinary clinic for a checkup of my blood pressure they just canceled on me. I told them they wouldn’t need to bother getting me a new appointment, since I was moving. Except now I’m thinking I might have been too hasty. We can’t get our stuff moved yet (for instance, the moving companies have recently been revealed to be corrupt and potentially dangerous – threatening customers, demanding more money than agreed on). So here I am. Still.
Today, the bus and train company just canceled the train, cheerfully announcing that I was welcome to take the next train (about an hour and a half after my appointment at the maternity care center). So I called them and the rude woman just said, yes, we canceled the train. There was an unspoken ‘so?’ hanging in the air too. No replacement bus, no financial reimbursment (fortunately, I think I managed to rebook the appointment online, but since I haven’t had confirmation I don’t know for sure). Also, I was going to use my bus/train card that I just fill up with money. That is, I hadn’t booked a specific ticket. I can use the money on the card anytime I want.
It makes me so furious. Clearly, their business goal isn’t to transport people, it’s just to make money. Funny though, other businesses need to provide some sort of customer satisfaction, but apparently not this company. Grr.
I don’t know when I’ll be able to get to the new maternity center now. It’s probably going to be at least two-three weeks until I get my next appointment. In the meantime I’m not signed in anywhere as a patient. Also, I will need to get a referral to another hospital, because of my previous health problems. So first an appointment at the maternity care center, then another at the hospital, hopefullly. Fortunately, a doctor at the hospital is taking responsibility for my health, but the appointments are too few and far between. At this time I should probably go every week but I’m getting checkups every other week, or every three weeks instead. Fortunately, so far I’m feeling fine and according to the doctor, I really seem to be.
About tv and channels
I hate so called ‘reality series’ (what we in Sweden call ‘docu soaps’), talk shows and game shows. If it was up to me I wouldn’t pay for any ‘tv package’ because it wouldn’t be worth my while. I read the news online and I also watch the few tv series and movies online as well, legally of course. It’s my mom who insists on having a couple of channels – news mostly. Unfortunately, she also watches every single ‘event’, i e charity galas etc. Even more unfortunate is that since we live in the same house it’s impossible for me to escape the noise coming from the tv. Whenever possible, I try to go for a walk so I won’t have to ‘passively’ watch and listen to her shows.
Since I no longer feel it’s worth the money to have tv packages, it’s not such a problem for me personally, but a few years ago, I would have been really happy if the people selling these tv channels to consumers would have let us ‘cherry-pick’ the few channels we wanted, for a higher price, naturally. But no, they force you to pay for ten, twenty or more other channels, that I, for one, would never start. Never even use the settings to save on a certain channel number. So how can they make money from their commercials that I don’t watch, ever? It’s something I’ve never understood.
If I could have my wish, I’d like to see a special ‘channel’ that only had ‘real’ tv, like cop series, science fiction and movies. Not just the so called movie channels that mainly air movies that I’ve never heard of or that are extremely old, but not classics – like from the 1990’s and earlier, and still, it’s not the movies I might like to watch but stuff I’ve never heard of and quite rightly so, because they are probably the ones that both critics and viewers shunned when they first appeared. Whenever I have evaluated a ‘movie channel’ I’ve never heard of the movies included so where do they find this stuff?
Internet nostalgia
I just read a headline for an article about what sites people used early in the internet’s history. That made me think about what sites I used to go to maybe not ‘when the internet was young’ because apparently that was a very long time ago, but at the beginning of my own internet history.
I think that most of those sites were very common. Most people have probably used them some years ago – yahoo, google, aol (?). I chatted on ICQ and had quite a few friends then. About.com was another site I used to go to a lot. There were even chat rooms back then. The site still exists, but I haven’t seen any updates for several years (probably at least five years). Tumblr and Livejournal were two very important sites for me, but sadly I had to leave them.
I still use Care2. I have been on WordPress for a very long time. There’s even a blogger/blogspot blog that I don’t use, not my very first one, because I had one very early on, one that I deleted when google bought it.
Do I miss any of the old sites? No. I can’t say I do. The ones I’m using now are good enough, maybe better than the old ones. I do miss my old friends. It seems strange that I who feel so extremely lonely, used to have so many online friends. Of course, they showed up, became a part of my life and left again, over and over again, that is different people did, but I did have so many friends to chat with that I rarely felt lonely.
Another strange fact is that some of the friends I felt I was so close to, are just gone from my memory. I have forgotten their names. How can that happen? I think I might still have emails from them on some old disk drive or CD, but will I ever find them? I don’t think so. Maybe I should just accept that I had a great time back then and now it’s over?
I had a great time reading and writing fan fiction and even became a little famous in my modest way. Here in Sweden I have been on tv to talk about my slash writing. It didn’t turn out the way I had hoped but I don’t regret doing it. A couple of scholars have used my knowledge of fan fiction in their papers. Occasionally, I have run across a mention of me and/or my fan fiction here and there on the internet. That makes me smile. I still enjoy fan fiction even if things aren’t the same as they used to. These days, I suspect the majority of young and/or new fan fiction fans have never heard of my fandoms so there won’t be anyone new who takes an interest. Most of the newer fandoms aren’t for me, so I won’t end up making any new friends either.
Maybe sooner or later everyone ends up feeling nostalgic for the good old days. That reminds me of a new song by a favorite singer of mine – Darin Zanyar. His new song (at least it’s new to me) is called ‘Take me back’ (in Swedish). It seems he too, is nostalgic for the past. His better days. Now I’m sure he’s going to see better days again, but I doubt that’s true for me. I wish he wasn’t just hot and talented but actually had some magic that could ‘take me back’.
Enjoy.
Orange
I’m getting to be really tired of the color orange. It’s more or less everywhere online. Is it a ‘teen’ color or is it one that people of all ages like? Personally, I put it among my three least favorite colors (brown, beige, orange), yet most people seem to prefer them.
When it comes to blog themes, it seems to me that 99 % of them all are basically white (‘clean’ – or in my words ‘yawn’), but if there’s any other color it’s usually one of the ones I hate the most.
Actually, I’m beginning to see all this as a part of a much larger picture – the way the world is always leaning towards the side I hate. I’m not going to go into details, but if things can go either way, I find that most of the time, it leans in the opposite direction of what I would wish.
It’s very discouraging, though I must add that I never expected everything to go my way. I know it’s completely unrealistic. However, it would be nice if just once in a while, *something* could turn out the way I want it.
More whining
I’m sure all my friends have missed my whining. (LOL), but don’t worry, here I go again:
People don’t visit our publishing website. Ok, I can understand that not everyone wants to buy our books. Most people don’t even know we sell books (we need to work on our marketing skills, I know). That’s ok. Well, sort of. But I’ve been working really hard on making it a nice, interesting book-related blog too. And no one visits those pages/posts. Ever. What they keep coming back for are the pages where we list free legal downloads of books, mainly classics.
People also don’t visit our vegan sites, at all really. Sure, we’ve had visitors in the past and even now, we do get maybe 2-3 per six months or so. On the Swedish site. Far fewer hits on the international one. Again, I work quite hard at finding interesting articles to link to and whenever we’ve done some vegan product shopping or made a new recipe we try to post a photo or at least a comment on that. Still, no interest at all.
And finally, my personal homepage (in Swedish) gets the occasional visitor, one measly hit at a time a couple of times a week. Which should be good. But again, I’m trying really hard to post interesting varied stuff there and whenever I have posted a link to an interesting article (or I’ve shared a review of a book or tv series/movie), and I get a visitor, I think oh, that’s why. I’m always wrong. People are only interested in checking out the links to the tests of ebook readers, a photo of a particular modest little flower and a weird search term that I still don’t get, connected to the Muses. And I never ever get any comments at all.
Sorry about coming across like a five-year-old, but I actually feel a little better after having a bit of a whine.
Alternate titles for the same book are evil
Different titles for the same book (American and UK editions), are evil. This is the second time recently, I’ve accidentally ended up buying a book I already have. This time, it’s book 2 in the Obsidian Mirror/Chronoptika series, by Catherine Fisher. I already had The Box of Red Brocade and wrongly assumed that Slanted Worlds was book 3. Unfortunately, it’s still just book 2 and I could already have owned book 3. Also, apparently, it’s not a three but a four books series. How confusing. Or is it just me being stupid?
Bad tv and a stolen box
In case you’ve missed my whining, here’s a bit more. 🙂
Minor problem, but one that’s irritating me:
Tonight I expected to watch another episode of Midsomer Murders. Instead, Swedish tv has decided to air the Crown Princess’ birthday celebration all night.
Bigger problem, but perhaps one that has helped clarify things:
Today, mum and my sister went up to the cottage. (I hope she’ll post some photos from her outing). Everything was fine out there, except for one thing. When we left in a rush the last time we were there, we accidentally left a metal box out in the rain – not the kind the rusts, fortunately. Unfortunately, now it’s gone. And since this place is right in the middle of the woods with no road passing through (except a path for walking, and barely, driving tractors on), no stranger can have come up to the house. That means one of the neighbours must have taken it. I refuse to believe the lady who always helps us will have taken it, but I strongly suspect the hunter. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but there’s someone who’s constantly shooting at things, even out of season (we assume he’s practicing). On the other hand, we did run into a man with a hunting dog once and he seemed nice. There’s also a farmer, that I know absolutely nothing about (of course, for all we know, he could be the man with the dog).To be honest, I suppose one of the lumberjacks that the land owners call in to cut down trees, may have taken the box.
Be that as it may, we now feel rather upset with the place. In the past, we’ve hesitated to leave, for sentimental reasons. Our parents bought the cottage more than thirty years ago. It’s peaceful and pretty. However, now we’re thinking we should leave. It’s really difficult to have two different ‘homes’ and have trouble living in either of them. First though, we need to get our act together and move up there temporarily (while we fix up this place, in town). Then we’re going to look into moving the cottage and selling the land. I think the lady we bought the land from originally (her late husband really) will want to buy it back to grow trees on it. She’s still making money from forestry (using hired hands, naturally). We won’t get much, but maybe it will help not to have to worry about two, maybe three properties, again, neither very suitable for living in permanently.
There’s still a very long way to go before we can settle this, but maybe this unpleasant incident has helped us decide and to break the ‘deadlock’ we’ve been in.
