Learning Swedish in Sweden

would be easy, no? Or at least easier than anywhere else, given that it's not exactly a widely spoken language (no offense, modern Vikings! Don't come rampaging at me!). There's just one small problem:

I also speak English.

Don't get me wrong. Living abroad in a country where you can always switch back to English, especially for important things, is amazing. I don't know how I would describe our cat's recent digestive problems otherwise--maybe with a dictionary, hand gestures, and half an hour? But there's a small catch to this. I can speak enough Swedish now that when I'm at a restaurant or store, I don't begin in English, and most of the time, even if I don't literally understand what's being said, the meaning is pretty clear. So I do okay.

But if the conversation ever turns to my origins (such as when I was telling the nice woman in the bakery line why I'd forgotten to take a number, something a Swede would NEVER forget to do), then it's all over. Just like that, we're back to English, even though they were understanding me perfectly well just ten seconds before. (Or, if not perfectly well, then definitely on the second time. I'm still getting the hang of this language's stress-patterns.) 

I get it, I do. They're being kind and welcoming, speaking to me in my native tongue. They're also, on a slightly more selfish note, usually pretty psyched at the chance to practice their own (pretty much always) impeccable foreign language. Why I, as a practice opportunity, am so critical, though, I don't totally get--I understood it in China, knowing that most people wouldn't get any closer to an English-speaking country than Hong Kong. But here? Movies aren't ever dubbed, so long as the audience is assumed to be literate. (So for Brave, we're going to have to look for an English version, but that's it.) And there are plenty of expats and tourists around who DON'T speak any Swedish and have to lean on their English.

So yeah...I guess what I'm saying, Sweden, is that I'm going to do my best to learn enough of your language that you won't see through me immediately to my own. Fortunately for me, this is one of the few places in the world where I can pass as a local without much effort. Being blond is, for once, not a liability when it comes to disguise. Maybe I'll start saying I'm from somewhere way up north, across the Arctic Circle and near the Finnish border, which might explain my odd accent. 

(But I'm going to speak English at the vet for another few months, okay? I realize it's having my cake and eating it too, but jag har två katter, och jag vet inte hur man sayer "diarrhea.") 

And another thing about depression

What is the most burdensome disease in the world today? According to the World Health Organization,  the disease that robs the most adults of the most years of productive life is not AIDS, not heart disease, not cancer. It is depression.

In this post from the New York Times' "Opinionator" online column, Tina Rosenberg addresses mental health treatment in the poorer parts of the planet, which often means looking into whether it exists at all. I don't post this in ignorance of the long-standing debate about whether western psychology holds the keys to the world's problems (hint: it can't possibly), but rather to point out that mental illnesses, like physical illnesses, are to be found just about everywhere. How we talk about them and what treatment we provide will likely be different; the need to provide something, however, seems pretty clear. As a researcher quoted in Rosenberg's post puts it: 

“There’s an assumption that after you bury five of your kids you get used to it, and it doesn’t hurt as much...People don’t realize you don’t get used to it. You just give up.”

In a time when changing climates and trade patterns result in more and more people being uprooted from their homes and ways of life, this issue is only going to increase. So yes, let's mitigate the social and environmental and geopolitical situations that so often leave people vulnerable to disease of all kinds, but let's acknowledge that once these diseases do exist, people need treatment--whatever that might be for them. And let's not lose sight of the fact that there is also a broad gap in access to effective treatment within our own country.

A Time Before Jet Lag

I've been dipping into this massive tome by Norman Davies, Europe: A History, that a family friend gave us before we left California. This passage jumped out at me this morning:

Imagining the Middle Ages is, indeed, the problem. Historians have to stress not just what the medieval scene contained but also what it lacked. In its physical surroundings, it lacked many of the sights, sounds, and smells that have since become commonplace. There were no factory chimneys, no background traffic noise, no artificial pollutants or deodorants. Tiny isolated settlements existed in an overpowering wilderness of forest and heath, in a stillness where a church bell or the lowing of a cow could carry for miles, amidst a collection of natural but pungent whiffs from the midden and the wood fire. People's' perceptino of those surroundings lacked any strong sense of discrimination between what later times would call the natural and the supernatural, between fact and fuction, between the present and the past. Men and women had few means of verifying the messages of their senses, so all sorts of sensations were given similar credence. Angels, devils, and sprites were as real as one's neighbours. The heroes of yesterday, or of the Bible, were just as present (or as distant) as the kings and queens of one's own country. (432)

When I try to envision this particular neighborhood of the past, it's that isolation that I find most fascinating. It's true that sometimes we tend to overdo it in our conception of those times--genetic analysis, along with archeaology, makes it very clear that people have been moving and mixing for time immemorial--but for an ordinary person, especially if that person was female, life might easily be lived in an area no bigger than a day's travel. Beyond that would all be rumors, fireside stories, and hearsay.

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Sometimes You Need a Glass of Wine

Especially when you're doing research on the nastiest and messiest and quickest way to kill off a character with cancer. Only it can't be too nasty, or it would only take a few weeks and we don't want that, but it can't be too survivable, so that the reader won't buy the quick disease progression. I'm usually able to maintain a very healthy emotional distance when reading about medical stuff (a book on the plague in Europe comes out for Kindle in three days, and I will be purchasing it), but having lost more family members to cancer than anything else...well, come to think of it, that's about all that takes us out (knock wood!). Suppose it could be worse.

Lori Moore once came to talk to my MFA workshop about getting a book called A Writer's Guide to Poisons. She was practically giddy about it, but I think that a large part of that giddiness was her enjoyment of the effect that telling people usually had. I don't know whether she expected us to pull our drinks in a bit closer; personally, my reaction was to check out that book on Amazon as soon as I got back to my apartment. (There was also the moment when I got a beautifully shocked reaction out of her when I told her I usually stay away from caffeine, but that's another story.)

All that said, I do still feel just a little guilty as I plan a fictional character's death. Unlike me, they never really see it coming.

On the Value of Depression

One evening, after our workshop let out, four of us from my MFA fiction cohort crammed into a car to drive through the Caldecott tunnel. We were discussing class, probably discussing our classmates and their work--I don't remember the specifics. What I do remember, however, is one of us saying that a particular classmate was neurotic. "Of course he is," someone else said, indignant. "We all are. We're writers."

I would be lying if I said that there weren't times when I've wondered whether being mentally healthy is a liability in my chosen path, that maybe I've gotten myself to a point where I'm too sane for greatness. 

I don't think it's just that we expect extremes to go together, whether extremes of talent, personality, behavior, or whatever, even though that's clearly part of it. Culturally we are far more likely to forgive, or at least overlook, eccentricities if they come packaged along with incredible talent. (What, Mr. Jobs? You want a genetic background of that sushi you just ate? You got it.) I think we've come to demand it as a method of artistic authentication. And when I talk about writers, I'm not talking about the Malcolm Gladstones or Michael Pollans or Jonah Lehrers of the world, although that group's clearly been having its own problems lately, problems indicative of a whole other batch of fallacies about writing and ideas and public personas (but that's another post). I'm talking about the fiction writers, the painters, the singers, the actors--David Foster Wallace,  Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger. Go back a little further and there's Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Vincent VanGogh. And so on. I could go on for quite awhile.

And it's dangerous.

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