So, a month into International Committee and things are coming together. This week has been 35 hours in the office. Despite taking 9 days free for Interrailing and visits in the the South of France I have clocked up roughly 70 unpaid hours work. Rather a lot of work when you consider this is not technically a voluntary post! The first of my ten modest monthly cheques will arrive at the end of August. So far there is a running total of 10.5 hours overtime… if you count the likelihood I will work 8 hours during each of the next two days that means 16 hours; plus 4 of the overtime and my week’s quota of 20 are filled before the Mexico excursion  begins. There are still 6.5 extra hours carried over to the next week meaning that my total deficit is just 13.5 hours when I return home. No fear that I will not double the recommended weekly working hours in the following week, and reasonably triple them the week after with the arrival of our new students.  No problems. It is not stressful. Taking this jobs was a conscious choice. Overtime in the summer was to be expected.

However, knowing this there are a couple of aspects of human behaviour that are becoming increasinly hard to ignore:

PRODUCING HEALTH

The weekend has been spent at both work and play. There has even been a 3 hour stint in the office on Saturday and 4 hours here today. Yet spending  time developing the CG-MZ relationship and “producing health” in it’s simplest form i.e. quality time with the partner, leaves us both with something of a guilty conscience. Is it genuinely wrong to spend a rainy weekend watching films, eating and laughing while discovering physical and mental potential? Or has our culture/ambition got the better of us?

UTBILDNING VS. BILDNING

Utbildning = academical development

Buildning = personal development

It has to be said that a few of the emails I receive as head of the IC leave me a little lost of words. Incoming and outgoing students alike write the most extraordinarily un-proficcient emails about the most trivial subjects. Many lack basic etiquette (names, greetings and a signoff) while others contain problems which they could, honestly, easily solve alone with a little research and common sense…

After composing several diplomatically worded “sorry, but that is really not something my job is related to, but there are people who are much better equipped to help you” IC have declined to: work as wardrobe consultants, personally provide housing, find jobs or share details of personal monthly income/outgoings.

Simple proof that academic excellence does not necessarily mean ability in life’s daily challenges!

It’s been a while since I blogged. One of many reasons being that I now spend a large part of my working day in front of the computer and have little lust to spend my freetime there either. Another being that a large part of my working day is much larger than it used to be and spare half hours have been increasingly hard to find. However, the hormones are kicking in and it’s the monthly insomniac period. Despite that fact I now have my own office and have spent a considerable number of hours playing ‘grown up’ with members of the university staff and this city council, there has also been a myriad of simply pleasing childish moments - including some serious sock-puppet-synchronised-headbanging and a new approach to learning Swedish.

A highly entertaining way to learn new and complicated words holds it’s basis in the fact that Swedish is built, essentially on composite words (though rarely spondees). The composite word may be broken into two or more other words which can them be memorised. The joy of not having Swedish as a first language is that we may break a composite word in the wrong place and thereby give it a whole other meaning. However, the easiest way to memorise the word if to translate the broken word into English.

Bergström, which is just a name, translates as Electric Mountain, hence the title.

blixtlås - literally, lightning lock is a zipper

stänkskärm - splash screen, is a mudguard… and the list goes on. Light entertainment for the litterary inclined.

My new word for the day was svetsare, which sounds suspiciously like someone who sweats but is actually a welder.

Things with MZ are, to put it mildly, going rather well. Falling in love, is, when one thinks about it, an extremely alarming process. We take a huge number of risks, expose ourselves to emotional upheaval and participate in routine breaking behaviour that leaves you both clumsy (crashed my bike into a tree today…) and forgetful (left my handbag outside on the same bike a couple of months ago.) I wonder why we take these risks when there is the possibility that things will go so unforeseeably wrong. I have invested a serious time allowance to analysing the failure of previous relationships and conclude that there are few definite answers, just behaviours to avoid in future.

The strength I believe that lies behind the current CG MZ coupling is that we have no boundaries when it comes to conversation. And as such it seems only sensible to take this issue up. Despite that fact we split almost three years ago, David, my only ’serious’ ex has been a Sweden in Clover reader every so often - and even chosen to leave comments in either his own, or other ‘cleverly chosen’ names. This troubles me - not because I can not handle the rather weak insults, but because it genuinely bothers me that he has nothing better to do with his time than comment the blog of a several-years-ex-girlfriend. With this in mind, a significant collection of the comments are also nothing more than hypocritical. In short, the whole thing is rather tragic.

Relationships are like everything else - they need to be worked upon, renovated, cared for. They are also two sided, and will, without question, fail, if both parties have the same magnetic polarity. Underlying dis-attraction and inability to holds ones words will not enable relationship success. The only key is honesty.

Eye contact and communication. The ability to express ones’self is, as a wellknown creditcard commercial would say - priceless.