Hej, Vänner!

It probably comes at no surprise to most of you that I am currently recovering from, undoubtably, the worst flu of my life. My habit of collecting diseases, head injuries, and broken bones while traveling is as reliable as the sunrise. In fact, I realized yesterday that the chance of me living somewhere for five months and NOT breaking a bone is slim to none. And I'm thinking about monetizing this opportunity and taking bets. My money's on an arm.

My head is still filled with that dreamy lightheadedness that makes everything involving brain power take twice as long, but I'm doing a lot better. Yesterday, I woke up with a headache that legitimately made me wonder if I was dying. I finally lifted my head long enough to take a sip of water and, no exaggeration, I've never been in so much pain.

I've also been dealing with a lot of friend problems this week as well. Which is pretty annoying in any situation, but the fact that I was sleeping for 20 hours a day made it a million times harder to deal with the real world.

And I missed a handful of really big parties here in Uppsala. And there are pictures all over Facebook and I'm crazy jealous of all my healthy, gorgeous friends and their huge, happy smiles together. The fear-of-missing-out is a constant demon.

But there WAS this boy that skyped me like twice a day while I was gasping out my last will and testament. At one point, he talked me to sleep while I was in a feverish delirium and coughing up some kind of vital bodily organ. I'm not about to get all gooey about it, but give the kid some props. When the entire world was falling apart, inside and out, it was massively nice to have someone that wasn't horrified by my devolving existence.

In other news, I'm going to Helsinki in two weeks! The first time fell through (going to Finland over one of the coldest weekends in a decade didn't seem like the smartest use of time), but Viking Line (the cruise company of Scandinavia) is having a deal of free (literally, seriously, truly) Stockholm-->Helsinki-->Stockholm trips. I'm catching one of those freebies in March, and another in April for a huge rager at my friend's college, Åbo Akademi University (that may or may not involve beer pong and a lot of dancing).

I just thoroughly abused my right to parentheses.

There are a lot of other parties coming up, such as the Kroppkakegasque. Everyone gets really dressed up and eats a lot of these knish/dumpling things (Kroppkakor) and gets drunk and dances. And tomorrow I'm supposed to be going to a mixtape circle, where everyone just sits around and shares music. Isn't that such a cool idea? It's an entire club here. They have meetings like one a month. My nation also hosts a whiskey tasting club. Very sophisticated, much different from my habit of throwing it to the back of my throat as fast as possible and swallowing with a gulp of soda.

My new class, Political Theory, is REALLY cool. In Sweden, you take classes in blocks and I only have to take one at a time to keep up with my Boulder credits. Anyways, theory has always been really interesting to me and I get to make a presentation on Tuesday about Marxism and Utilitarianism. It's only supposed to be about 3 minutes long, but I started typing and now I'm about three times the limit on the paper version...so that's an issue. I fucking love Marx, though. You have nothing to lose but your chains! Workers of the world, unite! Stand together and demand your piece of the pie, you know? Mmm, Karl. Preach it, boy.

Hope everyone had a healthy week!