Childhood

Guyke, Butch and Ziggy have been pestering me for a first life picture of myself, but this is as far as I will go at the moment.

In the picture you see me on a donkey and my older sister being protective. The picture was taken by my father on one of our families vacations in the Pakistani parts of the Himalayas. Quite lovable ain't I, but which child isn't?

Dear Brad, You Are Not Alone!

In a comment today on Bock in SecondLife; Eddi Haskell dropped the bomb that even Brad Pitt, the most beautiful man in the world, has problems with nasal hair.

I have touched on this irritating affliction for men, nay mankind, in a previous post, Top Ten Reasons For Being A Male Avatar. So let me just take a moment to share with Brad: You are not alone you-sexy-studeliscious-hunk-of-male-beauty-you! Indeed I myself, and most adult men (and even some women I should think), suffer with you.

Wikipedia has this to inform on the subject:

"Nasal hair or nose hair is the hair in the nose. Adult humans have hairs in the anterior nasal passage. Its function may be to keep insects and foreign particles from entering the nasal cavity." (...) "A number of devices have been sold to trim nasal hair, including miniature rotary clippers, and attachments for electric shavers. The trimmers shorten the hair to such lengths so that they do not appear outside of the nasal passage. A pair of tweezers can be used which facilitates removal and an antiseptic cream applied after treatment on the end of a cotton-bud to reduce the risk of infection and soreness."

Not much help there, huh?

I first started noticing my nasal hairs when I had turned thirty, before that age I cannot remember ever being bothered by them. Since then I have tried a range of methods to remove them, all rather tedious, painful and/or unsuccessful.

1. Pulling
This procedure is extremely painful and takes a long time because you have to pull out each strand of hair individually. It is also a sorry sight to watch yourself weeping from the pain it causes.

Pulling can be done either with fingers or with tweezers. In both cases it is difficult to get a firm hold of the hairs and my nostrils aren't wide enough to allow two fingers to reach the the hairs that don't protrude and those that are too far inside the nasal cavity.

2. Cutting
This procedure can be done with scissors or a knife. I firmly recommend using a nail scissor.

This method allows you to shorten the hairs and you can take several of them out in one clipping. Alas you usually do not cut low enough and there is still the problem with the ones that are deep inside the cavities. There is also a risk of clipping into the membranes which is extremely painful and takes forever to heal. Besides can you imagine how much a cut inside the nose bleeds?

3. Nose trimmers (various models)
These are mostly ineffective, take too long and do not cut short enough anyhow. You still cannot reach the deeper set hairs. Pain occurs if you happen to get the apparatus in a bad angle and it cuts into the membrane.

I have not tried waxing or hair removal yet, because both those methods seem harmful to use on membranes.

As a child living in Pakistan I can remember the barbershops using a method that I have later seen used in Turkey and Greece also, It seemed fast, efficient and painless as far as I could observe, alas it is not practiced in Sweden.

This method consists of singeing the nasal hairs. The barber catches a cotton swab in a pair of tweezers and then dips it into a liquid. He then proceeds to light the swab with a match and passes it under the nose while the customer is careful not to inhale. I would use this method if I could but my problem is I do not know what liquid the swab is dipped in. I should think it could be ether or alcohol, but I am not at all certain.

Come to think of it, why hasn't a modernized version of the age-old singeing method been invented using electricity I wonder? One would (meaning I, me and myself) think that it cannot be that difficult for all the talented scientist and technicians in the world to help mankind with this important issue. Anyone may use my suggestion here royalty free!

#dethärärmittland

The hashtag in the title is used in thousands of tweets in the Swedish parts of Twitter today. Translated to English it would read #thisismycountry. I will go into the reason for the flood of tweets with that hashtag but first let me leave this message.

Bock, 42 y.o., laird, born in Lund, Sweden, by ethnic Swedish parents, moved to Lahore, Pakistan when I was 11 months old. I returned to Sweden when I was 13 y.o. as a blonde, fair skinned, ethnic Swede speaking better Swedish than those around me who had never left the country. When I "returned to my homeland" I was in effect an immigrant who spoke English and Punjabi as fluently as I spoke Swedish. I did not understand Swedish culture, society and norms of behaviour. In every way, except for my ethnicity and command of the language, I was culturally Pakistani and hated being dumped in this terrible and cold country by my well meaning parents. Not until I was 20 y.o. did I feel that #thisismycountry.
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The reason for the flood of tweets today on that theme was the unveiling yesterday of a film taped on a cellphone belonging to the Sweden Democratic Party parliamentarian Kent Ekeroth, the party´s legal policy spokesman, almost two and a half years ago. In the film we see Mr. Ekeroth and two of his party colleagues in a confrontation outside a McDonald's restaurant in Stockholm.

One of the colleagues, Erik Almqvist, the party´s financial policy spokesman, is seen telling Soran Ismael, a Swedish comedian of Kurdish extraction, why he cannot claim Sweden as his country. After that Mr. Almqvist moved on to name calling of a xenophobic nature and to calling a young woman who tried to interrupt the confrontation "the little whore".

The cellphone film has forced Mr. Almqvist to step down from all his political offices within the party, while Mr Ekeroth has declared that he is taking a timeout after his film showed the three parliamentarians arming themselves with iron rods.
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Update: The best tweet on the subject that I have found so far. Kurdo Baksi is a Swedish social commentator, journalist and author of Kurdish extraction.

Translation to English:
"My name is Kurdo Baksi and I am 47 y.o. I love eating kebab with lingonberries and take long lonely walks in the forest #thisismycountry"

For Nostalgic Reasons

Nostalgia is great sometimes. Today - as so many times before - I suddenly get the tunes and words of the Pakistani National Anthem on my mind.

I lived eleven of my first twelve years in real life in Pakistan together with my father and mother and my two sisters. I totally loved the people, the culture the food - well everything except the radical Islamists. Even as a child I can remember myself thinking "What the hell is this about?"

Well things changed as we moved back to my homecountry Sweden when I was twelve. As a truely Punjabi boy with the bad fortune of having all-Swedish ancestry I felt totally out of place in Sweden. I had a total culturecrash that lasted for about four years.

All those four years I hated being in Sweden, being Swedish, hearing Swedish and eating their lousy, Swedish, bland, awful food that tasted like paper and nothing else. I wanted to go "back home to Pakistan" with every fiber of my body.

Relearning the social codes of human interaction was the hardest.

Everytime I talked to a Swede he/she would think I stood to close and wonder why I was holding on to him/her. As they tried to back away from me I would merely follow not understanding what was going on. This kept on til someone finally asked me right out and the problem was made clear to me.

In Sweden we always stand at arm´s length from the person we are talking with, and there is definetly no reason at all to hold on to the other person.

Pakistan still means a lot to me, although I can no longer say I love it as I used to.

P.S. Close to 29 years later I still remembered the first verse of the anthem correctly, the second verse not so good and the rest felt like complete news to me...