Woke up pretty late. Martin cooks hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, which we eat with this mild caviar stuff from the grocery store (it wasn’t expensive like actual caviar, but it was still fish eggs, and I thought it tasted really good!)
We goofed around for a while just playing music and singing along. We also booked my flight to Paris and figured out the tenuous path I would need to take to the weird cheaper airport at 3am. It was nearly 3 before we went out for our planned tour of Uppsala, and the sun was golden on the snow. It was really cold, but beautiful. We checked out some of the university buildings, then the cathedral, which was strikingly different from the great cathedrals of Italy and Eastern Europe. It had gorgeous Gothic arches and pillars that somehow gave the feeling of airy lightness and majesty at the same time. Instead of the ceiling looming over you ominously, it seemed to be saying, “I’m so high and lofty you don’t notice me unless you look.” and then, bam! Quite an impression. The windows were also beautiful. Behind the altar there was the grave of a great Swedish king who, after losing Stockholm to the Poles, out-skied his pursuers to northern Sweden, gathered an army, and swept the invaders back out. Then he Protestantized the country, gaining lots of extra state control in the process.
We walked back out and along the river, which was lovely. It was still frozen over in some places. Then we proceeded to the station, so we could find where my early morning bus would leave for the airport. After that we made a loop back, pausing only to get some creme fraiche at the grocery store. I tried to pay for it but the grocer needed to get my ID and then check some number, which I guess is the law here–most people just ignore it but this grocer was new on the job and tried to go through the whole rigamarole.
We got back and immediately set to preparing dinner. Martin fried some pork steaks in butter–which were great–and mixed creme fraiche with soy sauce and sweet chili sauce for an accompaniment–which was decidedly weird. My old vendetta against cream cheese coming out ;)
Then we hustled out to make the beginner lesson for a salsa social which Martin had been attending regularly. I hadn’t done salsa in forever and needed a) a refresher b) access to the moves that other beginners would know. The beginner lesson was in Swedish with a sprinkling of English but was pretty intuitive.
I danced for a while, met some interesting characters–e.g. an American-Swedish biotecher turned salesperson who felt hampered by Swedish cultural pressure against ambition (I learned later from Erik there were words for this. One pronounced LOG-ohm, which means “exactly the right amount”, and describes, among other things, the appropriate amount of ambition one should have.)
Dropped back to the adjoining bar and hung with Erik and Martin for a while. Martin knew everybody and eventually he got swept in to keep dancing. Chatted with Erik about his project, which dealt with how best to irradiate a tumor without irradiating surrounding tissue–a complicated optimization problem.
Then, a strange thing happened. I wasn’t really feeling up to more dancing and socializing a priori. I also got a text message which stressed me out a bit (for no real good reason). So I decided to go and get myself a Subway sandwich while Martin kept dancing. I was looking for my coats, which I’d hung up amidst tons of other coats. Somehow, I managed to convince myself that my blue polar fleece was not mine, that it was someone else’s very similar looking blue polar fleece, and that mine was still lost in the pile. I went to get my sandwich, read some Gwern, hung out at the Subway for an hour. Martin finally came out and snuck up on me at the Subway and we went back to find my coat, whereupon I realized the obvious–the coat I’d seen had been mine all along! How strange. I really lose my faculties in little moments of stress/tiredness. I wonder if there’s an effective way to learn to stay sane in such conditions. I am pretty proud of having kept my wits about me all through this madcap trip through Europe and not losing anything important/getting anything robbed/missing any flights… :D so I’ll transfer a little bit of angst to gratitude and pride here. This is a new theory I have. I was trying to characterize angst, that obnoxious feeling encompassing FOMO, most school related stress, basically all the stress my family has ever undergone… and at its most basic, angst is 1) seeing bad outcomes 2) attributing them to oneself. It’s a catalyst of change and rethinking and feels, at its worst, like you’re a frog in a pot with the temperature slowly being turned up, with NO plan for escape, and only the desperate desire to devise such a plan. But this characterization of angst has a natural parameterization which generates complementary emotions. I discovered it while trying to formalize my intuition that “the opposite of angst is gratitude”. Just replace “bad outcomes” with “good outcomes” and “oneself” with “the environment”. The resulting 2x2 is
- seeing bad outcomes and attributing to oneself: angst
- seeing bad outcomes and attributing to the environment: kvetching
- seeing good outcomes and attributing to oneself: pride
- seeing good outcomes and attributing to the environment: gratitude
So in some sense, the oppositve of angst is gratitude, but one can also resort to pride or complaining.
This incidentally gives me some new insight into complaining. I never really understood complaining. It was both fatalist (because you attribute things to the environment) and pessimistic. But now that I array it as an alternative to angst, which is the only emotion that makes logical sense in some sense, i.e. aimed directly at improving oneself but often a miserable emotion to have, I start to understand why people complain.
A further note: the reason I write “seeing bad outcomes” and “seeing good outcomes” vs. “experiencing bad outcomes” is that these emotions are filters. They are not objective. In nearly every situation, one could choose to feel gratitude or pride over angst or kvetching (or vice versa). The same with attribution–although here you’re more likely to just delude yourself as opposed to applying a filtering operation.
Because of my Towards Perfection inclinations, I’m liable to always choose to feel angst. This is a big problem that leads to positivity deficits, being afraid of thinking, and so on. So my new program is to detect angst and redirect it to pride, gratitude or kvetching whenever appropriate.
Aaanyway, where was I? Walked back with Martin talking. I was in this weird state of mind where I would gladly bounce back whatever conversation he offered, but walked head down into the cold and looked as though I wasn’t conversing at all. My posture said, “let’s just get out of this wind and snow, alright?!” Got back and we had something of a deep conversation before crashing.