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Visit Sweden
in April or May
I made some
nasty remarks
earlier about the Swedes and Britney Spears, so let me make up for it a
little. I went to a Lutheran Sunday school for about fifteen years, so
I'm actually a Scandinavia buff.
American conservatives have to hate
everyone, even nice folk like Canadians and Swedes. (Hating the French
is easy -- the French hate each other, and they don't care what you
think anyway.) But when conservatives slime the Swedes, they have to
figure out more reasons than just Socialism. So usually they zero in on
the stereotype: all Swedes are dour, depressed, suicidal alcoholics.
The stereotype is not completely
false, but it's exaggerated. Stockholm is almost as far north as
Southern Greenland, and in the winter when there are only a fee hours of
pale, dim sunlight, people do get depressed and show some of the
symptoms of S.A.D., including those mentioned. (Incidentally, eastern
Sweden is also almost as far east as western Turkey.)
Well, recently when visiting the blog
How to Learn Swedish in a Thousand Difficult Lessons, a question
popped into my head: "Just out of curiosity," I asked, " is the
famous Scandinavian depression during the long dark winters matched by
euphoria during the short bright summers?"
The first answer was a mild little
"Yes", but the second answer blew the question right out of the water:
| John Emerson; yes, it SURE is!
Having 22 years of experience....we tank up the joie de vivre in the
never-ending summer days, suck every bit of blood out of it, otherwise we
would be totally drained out by sometime in February. Now we are only a
bit ( sometimes very) depressed, but we never fail hoping for the
fertility to come back sometime. I am just officially experiencing my
spring fever, it's in every part of the body, it bursts! :D I was total
cynical last month, although I didnīt know why, and now Iīm just all
filled with Love and Lust and Longing! Really, physically, and itīs
really intense! Itīs a great and exciting transformation, and it happens
every year in late April-June. Iīm sorry about the flummigness of this
post but Iīm just not as good at English as I would wish, but this is a
true thing in our mentality, just as most of us get really depressed at
least sometime during the winter months. That makes us really
melancholic and season-oriented. Some people note that Swedes seem cold
but we are just really longing for the summer, and we have big trembling
hearts inside. :) (Slightly edited, and
anonymous because I'm not able to contact the author, who signed a
woman's name). |
That's about as convincing a
"Yes!" as you're ever going to hear. It's self-referential,
too -- she gets all excited when she tells us how excited she is. (Now if we only knew what what
"flummingness" was....)
I hope she goes into writing.
UPDATE: "Flumming" is
Swedish
jive for "things that a typical hippie does."
|
I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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Idiocentrism
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