While walking up the stairs after my run today I thought I might write boastfully here about my first sub-hour circumnavigation of S\u00f6dermalm, and how I did it solo, without a wheezing bouncing Joachim by my side, after he broke an agreement to come running with me, citing prior children.<\/p>\n
But taunting Joachim like that would not be nice, so I won’t, though I fear you might be disappointed by what then remains of my post: sage descriptions of jogging Swedes that crossed my path in droves as I squinted into the late evening sunlight, a segue into how healthy Swedes are; how, more generally, duktig<\/em> they are in everything they do. I’d then have to explain the word duktig<\/em><\/a> to you, and recount how Emma<\/a> once said there is no accurate English equivalent. It does not merely mean “good, able, capable;” there is an element of relentless self-improvement implied by its use; it is an inner initiative to learn from mistakes that makes Swedes duktig<\/em>IKEA pitches in with an illustrated example<\/a> of the word duktig<\/em>.<\/span>. At least all those who are not slarvig<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Or I might try to recount the thought processes of an hour-long run, how fragments of a rather good short story<\/a> I had read just previously came back at odd moments, but I’d just embellish it, and maybe even make stuff up, like for example how some people can look like they are running fast when they are not, and vice versa — I just thought of that now. In any case, such writing would come across as earnest, and we hate that.<\/p>\n Perhaps I should just start a new genre where I do not actually write a blog but just describe imagined blog entries that I have not written. Noncommittal writing, I would call it, and I would engage in it in the more transient phases of my life, when nothing is really certain or cherished notions are in a state of flux, when writing down thoughts would give them more permanence than they deserve, like putting shacks up on the World Heritage List<\/a>. And there is something wonderfully Calvinoesque or Borgesian to it all. Maybe I should just post reviews of my imagined rants, pronounce them the work of genius, but report back inexpertly and confused, and depend instead on the imagination of readers to construct something of proper greatness out of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While walking up the stairs after my run today I thought I might write boastfully here about my first sub-hour circumnavigation of S\u00f6dermalm, and how I did it solo, without a wheezing bouncing Joachim by my side, after he broke … Continue reading