on sweden, and my home town, and things
thursday, march 7, 2002
i skipped classes today (but not my evening french test) and stayed in front of the telly, catching such rarities (for me) as cops and, well, more cops. sheesh! naked people everywhere. very disturbing. one girl got forced into a car at gun point by the driver. the driver was only wearing clothes on his upper bodies. luckily for the girl, he hit something, the car flipped, and the police got him.
later, another guy was found almost buck naked doing, hrm, something in his truck that was parked in a remote parking lot. i'm still not sure what, but hrm. heh.
after the test tonight, i came online and read the local newspaper for my town back home. it made me snort laugh. apparently, the jewellry (yes, THE) store got broken into last night. no, that's not funny at all. but it took the cops about half an hour or so to get to the crime scene after a neighbour scared the thieves off. why?
because my town is so small and pathetic, we no longer have our own police car patroll. not one. and yet once they got there, from the next town over, the police made a statement that they are "hot on the thieves trail." riiiiiight. they've only had about half an hour to an hour to disappear.. (although i guess maybe eyewitness i.d. or whatever.)
makes you feel so safe, y'know, about ending up in a volatile life-endangering situation, call 911 and wait 20-45 minutes for a cop car to even possibly be able to get to town, much less to your spot. i'm not sure what the plan there is. maybe the local fire department can come while you wait?
i'm amazed not more obvious crimes are happening. with the crap surveillance (that i've seen) and the pitiful police presence.. why not? or maybe i should be relieved not more think like me. heh. i mean, knowing how easy it would be to commit crimes at home makes me WANT to, and i'm not sure that's a good thing. :)
what else.. oh yes. there's a horrid case going on in sweden where a father shot his daughter because she was too into wanting to be like other swedish girls.. it's termed an "honor" killing. it was very tragic, and i've been reading about it almost daily in swedish newspapers since it happened a month or two ago.
well, today the l.a. times published an article on it, so if any of you english readers are interested (it's a very sad but needed story), you can click here and read, i think.
when i spent fall of 2000 back home, there was a news story in our local paper that a dad in my down had beaten his daughter because she apparently was dishonoring him and the family by wanting to do swedish teen things, like going to parties, or having male friends at school, or a boy friend.
a few days later i was talking to my dad about it, and it turned out the man in question was his half-brother, and the girl, well, my.. half-cousin? i was really shocked.
i'd wondered quite a few years why my dad, despite the fact that suddenly a clump of family from his native country bosnia had re-located to ronneby due to the war, never really seemed to have much contact with them, or had me meet them.
he told me he preferred not to associate too much with them, brother or not, because he found his brother to be utterly unreasonable with his children (my cousins), especially the girls. my dad would protest when his brother would punish or yell at his daughters, but eventually simply opted to stay away. i'm sure there are more and deeper reasons, but that was so strange for me to hear.
i don't often see fit to bring up that much of my past beyond little moments, but, well.. my parents got married during the 60s when my mom became pregnant. it was not by any means a happy marriage, mainly because my father took out his frustrations with his unwanted marriage and difficulty coping with his new country on her and my brother by beating them up. a lot.
there was a lot of jealousy, rage, ruined furniture and loud voices. i don't have very many memories of our life of living together under one roof, because my mother managed to pull away and get a divorce when i was about 5 years old. it also helped that i was my father's little princess child. this all has been the root to the deep resentment my brother hold against me, that he had to grow up in that hell and i was spared.. but i digress.
after the divorce, there were a lot of sketchy years where he lived with a fairly dominant, yugoslavian woman and her daughters. i spent every other weekend with them (my brother was in his mid-teens and my father showed zero interest in having any sort of interaction with him) that were odd and uncomfortable.
it's strange. on one hand, i deeply know that my father loved me. on the other, there are stacks and stacks of incidents that still occur that has made our relationship very hollow and difficult, at least for me. again, i digress.
the mainthing i want to say though, is that my father changed. i don't know if it was the large take-no-shit woman from yugoslavia that simply would not put up with his crap, or if it was simply the fact that he got a fresh start with a family by choice, but i never saw much of his rage and violence again.
it's so strange for me when i hear my cousins make comments about my father and his past presence in my family. they speak of him as a terrible force, and allude to incidents that they've heard their parents talk about.
i know that my brother, after demanding money from my dad throughout his 20's and early 30's, stopped speaking to my dad sometime ago, which is utterly puzzling to my dad and causes him great distress that he masks with comments of how it doesn't matter.
my mother never really speaks of it much, except vague comments. as i've become adult, she has shared a few stories that make my heart ache when i think of what he put her through. i found a few notebooks with letters she wrote to him but never sent when they were going through the divorce. the stories, and the letters helped me see my mother in an entirely different light.
growing up, i accepted my family's disparaging comments to my mother, especially my brothers. she was stupid, she was too emotional, she reads like crap and she is almost obnoxiously good-hearted, ghod can't she do anything right?
but then all the pieces started to come together. my mother is a young upper middleclass woman who had to deal with her small-minded family when she got knocked up by a recent immigrant who worked at the local steel mill. she married a man she could barely communicate with (literally! he barely spoke swedish) who came from a drastically different, rural background and who took out his frustration and aggression on her and her child.
after almost 16 years of abuse she pulled away and supported two kids by continuing her job as a secretary. did i mention the part where she is fairly dyslexic? and yet my family still give her crap about never being able to pass the written exam to get a driver's license.. bla bla bla.
the point is, my mom is amazing. and i'm so glad i got to realize that. anyway. back to whatever i was talking to.
oh yeah. my parents get along somewhat alright now, their greatest altercations having to do with who is being too stingy when helping me out with money.
me, i mostly know my father in the context of an absent parent who infrequently would make promises and then break them, and who shows his love the best way he know how: by giving me monetary support.
and so to bring this back to what i was talking about.. it's odd to hear my father say he's cut off contact with his brother because he disapproves with the way my uncle treats his family. y'know?
maybe it's selective memory? or maybe he justified it so utterly in his mind that it would never occur to him to compare his past behaviour with that which he now condemns? retroactive guilt? i don't know.
i'm glad that whatever "changed" him came along. i'm glad it happened when i was young enough that i at least didn't have to see too much of the damage he did first hand. and i'm glad to see that he is one of the few immigrants that were able to embrace this society and want his children to do the same.
i totally lost my thead--i really didn't meant to write that much about my family history at all. it's nothing new to people who have read this journal the past 5 and a half years, but still.
whatever. i guess i had no real point. let's see, what else do i want to say...
oh, yeah, completely irrelevant but.. gene got us tickets to go see janeane garofalo do her stand up at carolines in NYC next friday night! i'm beyond excited. she's been a favourite of mine for plenty of years. yeeeeey! very glad gene discovered she was gonna be there the same time i will be. cin cin. �� 8:55 p.m.
