Excuse me while I go and stare at the ceiling for a bit.

I assured him in equally (or feasibly more) broken Swedish that this was, in fact, the Swedish airforce doing silly Christmas things. He still looked visibly shaken but joked that Sweden was doing everything to make him feel like home.
He was from Syria.

It’s wild. It’s almost like a very unfortunate dating profile of someone who grossly overestimates their desirability just because they look good (from certain angles).

NB: Not representative of the US as a whole obviously, but this angle that everyone wants to move to the US as their ultimate end goal is just hilarious.

Side note: extremely surreal experience to be treated like a criminal that is trying to swindle her way into a green card only to leave my cosy German home to live in Appalachia without heating, running water, electricity or basic standards in education. Even 15 yo me clocked that.

Border control was already brutal when I moved there in 2008. At the very dangerous age of 15, they held me for almost seven hours and questioned me relentlessly, despite having the correct visa and travelling on a parliamentary scholarship. I’m simply not keen to find out what the future holds.

They just moved, and their new neighbours are ancient hippies. I’m piecing the story together in my head here. I hope mum has a good time but I also wasn’t prepared to have to give her the “do drugs responsibly” talk. Then again, when else would you start taking edibles if not in your 60s?

bsky.app/profile/luxw...

You know what? I’m going to encourage you to do that either way, and if you ever happen to be in need of a criminal defense lawyer in the specific jurisdiction that is Sweden, I happen to know just the guy!

”To be fair, man in his fifties suspected of killing his family. Doesn’t sound like my crew.”

I have questions about who exactly his crew is, but I’m glad that man ain’t in it.

I laughed way more than is defensible at this

Taking a page out of the big orange playbook on capitalisation there. Would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

At this point, the boating incident plays in a league of its own. It transcends all of this. It remains unchallenged.

Cc @bearlawyer.bsky.social, our miserable nautical legacy lives on!

I ended up going with a lot of DIY/paper crafts, but sometimes you just gotta concede that plastic trash (and slime, for some godforsaken reason) is what a certain cub demographic wants.

Side note: trying to stock two advent calendars while keeping the plastic trash to a minimum is the challenge of the year for me, and I say this during a year I emigrated, started a new job, got fired, had my bike stolen, paid over 3k in vet bills and bought a house.