Queen of Rambles

It is so rare for me to get a good picture of Erik that I simply must post ones that I do manage to capture. He is such a little turd head. He turns immediately when I ask him to say cheese. At any rate, he finally learned to pedal his little bike, but his legs are still a smidgen too short so it’s not all that fun for him.

Britishcowgirl asked how I met Mike. I have a lot of new readers lately so I think it’s time for a refresher course on the Mike and Carrie love.

Many, many moons ago I was a lonely, depressed high school English teacher on the coast of Oregon. I spent all my time hanging out at a forum dedicated to the Wheel of Time fantasy books. At one point I even started my own fan site dedicated to Wacky Wheel of Time theories. Looking back now it was pretty pathetic, but at the time I thought it was awesome. My first ever e-mail from Mr. Mikey was a theory for the wacky theories page. Awwwwww. . .

Eventually that little community split into pieces thanks to typical Internet drama. Yes, I was a drama queen. I’m an Aries. I like to be in charge and I like to be right. I started my own community, only I wanted to focus on something broader than just one series since I saw much more growth potential for something bigger. I spammed Fantasy Freaks Forum so much that Mike had to see what all the fuss was about. Yes indeedy, I was an annoying spam troll. I would probably needed to be slapped.

We both spent a lot of time on the forum. One dreary day right before I plunged into my second year of misery teaching, I made a post asking for a someone to marry me and take me away from all my troubles. Why yes, I needed to be slapped. Why yes, I watched way too many Disney movies as a kid.

Mike, my hero, responded and said he’d marry me so we got engaged and flirted outrageously for six months without ever really knowing anything about each other.

Finally, the dear boy got ICQ (an old school form of instant messaging) and we were suddenly chatting every day and found out that we were really interested in each other. That was in April. By May Mike had tickets to fly from Sweden to Oregon for our first visit. The boy means business when he’s in love.

He visited in August even though I tried telling him that I was really ugly and he wouldn’t like me when he met me. I had major self-esteem issues, but he was unfazed and suddenly he was in my apartment and we were in love and he kept coming back every few months until I finally applied for a Swedish residence permit, quit my job and eventually moved over there! We got engaged for real several months later, then got married a year after that.

Do we ever have culture clashes? Not so much. He is so laid back that he has adjusted to life with an American very well. Occasionally there will be some idiom that he won’t get, but all in all we don’t have many clashes in our relationship.

However.

You knew that was coming, right?

I am not as laid back as he is. I had major problems living in Sweden and I have major problems understanding the Swedish way of doing things. I don’t understand the lack of communication between family members. I don’t understand things that I consider to be lack of common courtesy but that Swedes would consider to be fake. I most certainly do not understand the menu items on a typical Swedish platter. Luckily Mike is happy with my cooking and doesn’t insist I learn to make mashed rutabagas with a side of pickled herring (though is family does expect me to eat lots of moose patties and mushroom sandwiches when I visit).

When we lived in Sweden we were in the northernmost city, Kiruna. It is above the Arctic Circle and at least a four hour drive to the nearest “big city” which is not exactly all that big by any standard. That is not even a nearby IKEA! I couldn’t adjust to the midnight sun in the summer or the 24 hours of darkness in the winter. Have any of you seen the movie Insomnia with Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hillary Swank? It does a great job capturing the feel of the midnight sun.

I also had a really hard time adjusting to the attitude of conformity. I don’t know how much of this was actually the Swedish attitude and how much of it was my one and only friend telling me that it was the Swedish attitude, but it drove me insane. In Sweden most people put up different curtains at Christmas time. My friend said she would help me make my curtains, but when I picked out a blue and silver fabric she flipped out and refused to help. Instead, I had to buy red and gold so I could be normal. One day we were on a walk and I got hot. I took off my coat and tied it around my waist. You would have thought I had just stripped down and done a jig. She was mortified. Why? Because everyone else had their coat on. I would stand out! The horrors!!!!

This conformity extended to holidays. I’m used to families having traditions. I’m not used to the ENTIRE country having the same traditions. It was so weird for me to have so many meals dictated by what you are “supposed” to do. Sure, we do that to some extent here, but nothing like over there. People get really upset if you mess with tradition, even if they don’t care for the tradition. My brother-in-law eats some really gross rotten fish every Christmas Eve because “you are supposed to” even though he hates it. What???? I’m a big fan of only doing things you want to do unless it is a responsibility that must be done. I’m not going to eat something I don’t like just because people have been eating it for hundreds of years. I guess that is why I often heard that Americans have no culture. On any given holiday you can walk into five houses and you aren’t likely to find the EXACT same things happening at the EXACT same times in the EXACT same way. Of course, Sweden is opening up to a lot of immigrants these days so their time of rigid conformity may be coming to an end. Also, I was up in a very small redneck town so I think that contributed to the feeling of conformity.

There are good points to living in Sweden, but I think they are only good if you are actually happy living there. I’m much happier in America even if we don’t get some of the benefits of living in Sweden. Mike seems pretty happy here, too. So far his main complaint is the lack of vacation time and the fact that people put syrup on pancakes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.