Alex's Alliterative Adventures

is the fear of large words. Well, sesquippedalophobia is the fear of large words, but hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is just the sequel, with added hilarity.

A friend and I have had a good laugh discovering a few questionable phobias:
Papaphobia – Fear of the Pope
Papyrophobia – Fear of paper
Parthenophobia – Fear of virgins or young girls
Xanthophobia – Fear of the color yellow or the word yellow
Urophobia – Fear of urine or urinating
Thaasophobia – Fear of sitting
Syphilophobia – Fear of syphilis
Sophophobia – Fear of learning
Russophobia – Fear of Russians
Peladophobia- Fear of bald people
Levophobia- Fear of things to the left side of the body
Anglophobia- Fear of England or English culture, etc

I could go on like this, but I’ll just direct you to the questionable source.

London stuff will come eventually, but there’s just too much to write down all at once.

I have no choice but to give Ryan Air a terrible review. Yes, the ticket was cheap. Yes, the flight arrived early. Yes, my plane was pleasantly free of snakes of any noticable size. BUT I CAN’T HEAR. My right ear has been plugged for almost 12 hours. In my last-minute rush, I forgot to bring gum to chew on for the descent. I’m also mildly sick. However, the real culprit here is clearly Ryan Air; their planes simply have shitty cabin pressure, and we all know that poor cabin pressure leads to angry passengers, which leads to civil unrest, which leads to terrorism. And so, the reason for my negative review:

Ryan Air hates democracy.
And kittens.

Well, I’m leaving in under 3 hours to catch a bus, then a plane, then a train, then a taxi, then a couch. After that, some stuff should happen.

For those of you in the london area, give me a ring for a pint or two. This is not a request.

I’ll be back on Sunday. See you cats later.

So I’m a lazy ass, and I still haven’t uploaded the pictures. I probably won’t get it done any time soon, since there are a lot of other things on my plate which always seem to take priority. For example, booking my tickets to London.

I’m probably not going to cause too much anarchy in the UK while I’m there from the 5th to the 10th. At the moment, I don’t know how the trip will work out. I could be crashing with any combination of family members, friends, family members of friends, hostels, and random internet stalkers. I’ve had a few choice locations and activities recommended to me as things-I-must-do-or-suffer-eternal-regret, but my actual plans consist of a vague, fuzzy picture of people calling each other chap as they spin in the lorry for a quid, tally-ho. If you guys have any travel recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

When I get back, I spend around 2 days studying for each of my exams, then I say my final goodbyes to Sankt Lars. I’ll be floating to Oslo on the 17th, arriving on the 18th, and floating back for the 19th. I’ll spend a brief morning in Copenhagen and do my best to ingrain every last memory I’ve taken from these past four months, then I’m airborne and Canada-bound. Even though I’m definitely going to return to Europe in a few years and rekindle some of the amazing friendships I’ve made here, there’s an air of finality that I just can’t shake. As a coop student, the only constant in my life has been change; when you leave everyone you know for a new city every four months, you get used to wiping the slate clean without batting an eye. I never realized it before, but what I used to think were endings were simply pauses. Just when I think I’ve left people behind for good, I’ll bump into Chris Charlton at 2am on a Sunday night outside of the Burlington go station, or I’ll pass Pratik on the street in two separate cities in the span of two weeks. It’s true what they say, it’s a small world. I guess my small world is just feeling a bit bigger.

A less melancholy thought: There is almost nothing in this world that I like better than swapping philosophies with an eloquent stranger. There’s a sense of reaffirmation that’s undeniable about knowing that other people are just as bewildered as you are, and there are few things more satisfying than helping one another pick up the pieces when you’ve opened each other’s eyes to truths so beautiful they bring your worldview to its knees.

Pip pip, jolly good, ya wanker.

My good friend linked me to xkcd yesterday. It’s absolutely chock full of geeky hilarity. I was particularly won over by binary sudoku, immediately followed by mixing curse levels.

In more real news, Amir was recently detained in a Norwegian airport, because he was brown. For those of you who don’t know Amir, he’s the least-brown brown man I know. He’s as brown as Tom is white. It’s kind of frightening that racial profiling has changed from something that cruel brothers scare their younger siblings with right before bedtime, and is now something tangible, something that has breached my happy little fantasy world where meals are gifts to be worshiped, pixies spread fairy dust while you blink, and racism is stupidity, not accepted professional behaviour.

Note to self: post the pictures, gosh-dammit.

I think that my ADD has accelerated to ADHD. Over the past few weeks, instead of enjoying my favourite songs once and skipping over 80 tracks to find the next hit, I just play the same tune again. And again. And again, and again, and then just to mix things up a bit, I play it once more. It’s like my ears unquenchably thirst for that particular flavour of freshly squeezed song-juice, so I must wringe the fruity notes dry until they bleed like stones.

I also beat minesweeper in expert mode in 83 seconds. One of my all-time favourite games is now empty and meaningless to me, since beating that score would require three or four pacts with Satan, with a few sacrificed babies thrown in for good measure.

I have watched the first 27 episodes of Prison Break in the past 4 days or so. I should try harder to remember that Jamie and Kate combined are almost always right.

First of all, I think that going for more than a full week without blogging earns me the title of Lazy Bastard.  That’s officially my longest hiatus ever, not counting the 20 some years I went without feeling the need to tell the world my current mood and song. (In case you were wondering: lethargic, and Sugarcult – Memory (Acoustic) from Punk Goes Acoustic.  Dear christ, that song is addictive.)

I was originally delaying this post until I had all of my pictures sorted and uploaded, but seeing as I just showed an impressive outburst of intellectual capacity by deleting every picture Mehrdad had given me, I figured I’d just upload them later and let you all browse the pics at your leisure. If you’re the picture enjoying sort, keep an eye on that them thar side bar over thar. When words fail me, the pictures may still fight the good internet fight.

Team Waterlund, consisting of Mehrdad, Farzan, and myself, started the weekend off by visiting the Absolute Ice Bar Stockholm, which was quite the experience. I’m mentally filing it in the same category as bungee jumping, which I generally refer to as “incredibly awesome shit which I will never do again until I learn how to exhale pure money.” The pictures I grabbed of this place were only mostly recoverable by Undelete Plus, but in the mean time you can enjoy the latest installment of the video blog:

After a brief reexposure with a nearly-Canadian climate, Farzan and I headed for the Iron Maiden concert. Since we arrived at the sold-out concert an hour and a half after it started, my hopes weren’t high, but Farzan’s black voodoo magic had us moshing on the stadium floor enjoying a band I thought was retired or dead with what must have been 30,000 other fans. This guy seriously knows his way around a concert.

Saturday was a day of business. It was a day of

anticipation,

preparation,

speculation,

Sunday was a day of abysmal failure. Team Waterlund didn’t provide too much honour to our families on that particular day. It was a great learning opportunity, though, and I’m so glad that I was given the chance to advance to the regionals with my teammates and compete with some of the finest minds I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Plus, Iron Maiden rocked hardcore.

Since last weekend, a few other events of note have occurred, such as student beatdowns, obfuscated political segmentations, the replacement of several doors with “fire-safety walls”, and a toga mosh pit.

The biggest scapegoat for my lack of blogging motivation this week was the prospect of sorting through pictures, movies, and files from the Stockholm weekend. I think that in the future, I’ll just continue to post other stuff in non-chronological order to prevent the tubes from getting clogged. As a random note, for those of you that have to deal with tons of photos or other media, what do you use to organize your files? How do you find duplicates, how do you sort and categorize them, and how do you post far too many details of your life to the content-absorbing void that is the internet?

5am sucks.