The Pauli Effect

Wolfgang Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist. He was a close friend of Carl Jung. He was a believer in synchronicity.

He was also the namesake of the "Pauli effect".

What is the Pauli effect?

Well, Pauli had the strange ability to make devices stop working. He became known as a serious jinx when in the room during any experiment. Devices would break, things would fall over, experiments would fail...

Even a close friend banned him from coming anywhere in the vicinity when an experiment was going on.

The Pauli effect...

Also know as the "Sorak effect".

See, the Sorak family seems to have a curse. Things fall apart whenever we are around. Or simple things go bad.

Just ask my father. Or my brother. Or consult any vehicle we have ever known.

A perfect example: The first car I owned at age 16 was bought from one of my dad's work friend's son. He had owned it for a while - it ran perfectly. I went over there to test drive it - ran perfect. Drove it home after purchasing it - ran perfect.

The next morning, I tried to start it.

Wouldn't start.

Proceeded not to start for the remainder of my ownership.

Things like this happen all the time.

My car in Illinois is a wonderful ghetto-rigged machine. The hood is tied down, I have a plastic figure wedged in the dashboard to prevent rattling, I have wedged anything from hygiene bags to peanut butter jars between the seat and the stick shift to prevent the rattling, my dashboard lights don't work, the emergency brake has repeatedly failed since the warranty expired, and my rear sway bar is currently tied up to the underside of my car after failing in a thunderstorm during the middle of the night on my way back from San Francisco.

Or ask my brother's Corvette that has been out of commission in my parent's garage for longer than he was able to drive it...

Or my father's car, constantly under repair...

It doesn't end there. It includes electronics. Or anything with moving parts. We are just bad luck.

Which brings me to Jenny's car.

First, about a month ago, we were visiting her friend Lena in Örebro. Everyone was planning to go to this outdoor concert and I was going to drive. It was remarkably hot that day and the car was like an oven.

As soon as I opened the car, I put in the key and rolled down all four windows. We all hopped in, I started the car, and we tried to roll up the windows a bit.

Click.

The driver side rear window wouldn't roll up.

It was stuck down in the door.

This resulted in an adventure for Jenny and I for the remainder of the evening. We purchased a toolkit, tried to get the door open, and, upon failure, I attempted to think of every MacGuyver way to get that sucker back up again.

Her window has been taped over with black plastic since that day. We still haven't fixed it.

Oops.

Last week, we were cooking dinner and realized we needed something else from the store. I volunteered to drive there and took off. There is a dirt and gravel road connecting Jenny's road to a main road and I was driving down this, twisting and turning. Suddenly, another car was coming. The road isn't wide enough for two cars, so I drove halfway on the road and halfway on the grass.

Not realizing it, I hit something.

(Un)luckily, the other car happened to be Jenny's parents.

Who happened to think I was driving crazy (in my defense, I wasn't... I'm a bit terrified of these Swedish roads and drive quite slow...)

And who said I hit a rock.

We didn't discuss the matter and everything seemed fine.

But Jenny's mom called the next day when we were in Norrköping at Jenny's school, three hours north. There was a bunch of oil in the driveway.

After a quick inspection, sure enough, I had cracked the oil pan.

It was Saturday and car shops wouldn't be open until Monday.

We proceeded to continually refill the oil for the next five days while trying to figure out what to do... polluting the Earth in the meantime. Through a series of emails with my father, he suggested everything from filling the crack with bar soap to supergluing a piece of aluminum over it to JB Weld to bubblegum.

In the end, I paid a shop to put on a new oil pan.

Total cost?

3,100 SEK.

I'll leave the conversion to you if you're interested in figuring out how much that is in dollars.

Oops.

I'm awesome.

If a Cluttered Desk is a Sign of a Cluttered Mind...

NORRKÖPING - Jenny and I drove up to Norrköping to check out a school. She was informed at the last possible moment that she was accepted to the graphic design program, so now we're here. She's in class checking things out and deciding whether it is right for her.

And me? Well, I'm here...

See, getting an apartment at the last possible moment is not quite as easy here as it is somewhere like good ol' BloNo. There's a process and rules and lots of other things involved, which really just means I have absolutely no idea how it works.

So Jenny's mom talked to someone she knows and this girl, someone Jenny had never met before, has let us borrow her apartment for a week because she's not here.

It's one thing to stay at someone's place when you don't really know them. Maybe they are some nice strangers that let you crash on their couch. Yeah, it's a little awkward when you are sitting around, but maybe you can find some things to talk about and get to know each other a little better. Maybe make a new friend even.

It is even more strange to stay in someone's apartment when they are not there. And you have never met them.

I don't even know what this girl looks like. The only pictures in the apartment are pictures of her horse, which she clearly loves dearly.

It's a nice apartment. The size is good, the things are nice...

But...

It's still a little uncomfortable.

Yeah, yeah, part of the reason is the whole "she's-not-here-and-I-don't-know-who-this-person-is" thing. But the other part is that it is just so...

Clean.

The place is spotless. I mean... spotless.

Everything is organized perfectly and in order. There is a symmetry to everything. It's all nice and straight.

I know this is coming from the guy who puts all his CDs and DVDs in alphabetical order... but that's purely because I wouldn't find anything otherwise. Just too much of it. Overall, my things exist in a state of controlled chaos. I know where the things are. I know what clean looks like. And I do dishes really slow because I insist on everything I eat off of being spotless.

I'm not like this. Never have been. Never will be. It's not in my blood. I'm too much of a pack rat.

And now I'm terrified.

I feel like I'm going to dirty the whole place up. Well, to be perfectly honest, we already have. Not like dirt dirt. But it sure doesn't look like it did when we showed up. We've already discussed how we're going to have to spend the whole last day scrubbing everything to get it back into mint condition.

I type at the coffee table in the living room and there is a black bamboo centerpiece with four candles on it.

And I've messed it up. My computer has pushed up against it and it is definitely not centered anymore. And I think I may have moved one of the candles...

Uh oh.

I feel like we have broken in to this place. Like we aren't supposed to be here and have to remember how it all looked before we showed up. Otherwise... someone might know we were here.

Everything is color-coordinated as well. Something I could never pull off. I mean, it has a great look to it. But I just love random objects way too much. I can't go to garage sales or flea markets without being drawn to all the amazing treasure that people have just seemingly cast off for no good reason. I feel like I need to adopt weird things. I have learned to fight that urge these days and am looking forward to getting rid of most of my stuff upon returning to Illinois. But it still doesn't change the fact that I have a five-foot tall inflatable monkey (credit for that one actually goes to my sister).

Hey, wanna hear the new joke I just made up... to my self... while sitting here...? (Hmm...)

What's black and white and IKEA all over?

This apartment!

Hahahahahahahahahaha....

Ha...

...

...ha.

(Listen... you asked for it, you got it. These are the kind of posts that occur when I have writer's block and have spent weeks thinking about everything other than writing. Now you get to smile and nod and deal with it.)

Have I Ever Mentioned How Much I Love Bureaucracy?

So... clearly there have been a lack of updates from my end recently.

It's been a long couple of weeks, mostly concerning how complicated things have become.

Here's the deal, as plainly as it can be broken down:

I want to stay in Sweden.

There are basically three ways I can go about that - find someone to give me a job and apply for residence and work permits based on that; apply for school here, get in, and apply for a residence permit based on that; or apply for a cohabitation permit.

All have their pros and cons.

So Jenny and I went to the Migration Office after many fruitless phone calls only resulted in my speaking with machines.

The fella there informed me that there is only one way to apply and that is to return home.

Which seems incredibly redundant to me since I am trying to stay here, but who am I to argue? America has made it incredibly difficult for anyone to get in for years now.

Besides, he said they would deport me if I didn't...

He said to expect 3-6 months for them to approve a cohabitation residence permit. With one of those, I can keep renewing it and I can work here without an extra permit.

The other routes would be perhaps more difficult. A work permit requires me finding someone that will give a job to a stranger that is struggling with the language, guarantee me quality pay, insurance, and proof that they need me instead of someone from Sweden or the EU. And then I would immediately have to leave if the job came to an end. If I went for a student permit, it would mean applying for several schools, several programs, waiting to get accepted, then applying for a residence permit based on that. The bright side is that I can work without a work permit.

Or... I can apply for a cohabitation residence permit. Easy, right? All I have to do is apply, surrender my passport, fly to New York at some point when they summon me for an interview, prove to them that I am in a serious relationship and am not just a slacker, then sit back longer and wait for them to make a decision.

Oh, and then the Swedish Embassy in America informed me to expect it to take 6 months because they just aren't "getting around" to the applications very quickly...

Awesome.

Good thing I'm not prone to anxiety at all.

At this point, Jenny and I are alternating days to worry about it all. I get Mondays, Wednesday, Fridays, and alternating Sundays. She gets Tuesdays, Thursday, and Saturdays, along with filling in the Sundays in between mine.

If anyone reading this happens to know important politicians here, or people at the Embassy, or loopholes... it would be much appreciated.

So, unless I decide to go with the illegal immigrant route, my flight lands in Chicago September 14th.

Poop.

How Someone Owes Tom and I A Writing Credit

It involves: a bad-looking beard, gibberish medical jargon, pointless references to injections, poorly developed characters, references to happenings that are never really explained, descriptions of people "going into the darkness" within, newspaper clippings, pages and pages and pages of printouts from the internet, organ transplants, close-up shots of someone underlining "Stem Cell Research" used as a dramatic device, inexplicable bad cuts back and forth between two scenes that are relatively action-free...

And a two-headed guard dog.

The newest movie from $now Bros. Films?

Nope.

It's the new X-Files movie.

While I sat and watched this atrocity, I couldn't help but think back on the nights Tom and I sat awake, slowly putting together what would be a Truly Horrible Script.

Late at night at the original Washington House, we started cobbling together a story from bits of student film footage, random story ideas written down long ago, and a list of supplies we actually had... all based around a film he made back in high school featuring our friend in a nine-year-old girl's bunny suit.

It was doomed from the beginning.

Not that we had any idea at the time. We couldn't step back far enough to really see what was on the horizon for us.

Whenever we encountered a road block (and I don't mean a stumbling point... I mean a road block with big bright letters that said "Do Not Continue!") we happily came up with something else to hurdle us over it, allowing the story to continue for some reason:

"Hey Nick, this seems like it's maybe not making much sense..."

"Well, let's create a government sponsored program/conspiracy thing! That should clear things up!"

Or:

"Hey Tom, this is starting to get a little convoluted..."

"Well, let's add another character to the mix then to help explain some things!"

Or:

"Hey Tom, it looks like I've got a square peg here..."

"Uh-oh... and I've got a round hole..."

"Let's use a BIGGER hammer then!"

We had grand plans.

And a storyboard for it all.

And revisions.

And rehearsals.

We got all of our friends involved and made a shooting schedule around them (almost exclusively taking place between the hours of midnight and 3am).

And we didn't want to wait to get started. I had just ordered an expensive camera but we wanted to get started on filming before it would arrive so we went ahead with a regular camcorder. We also didn't want to wait to go through all the trouble of finding the necessary props for the "action scenes", so we decided to save those for last, even though it would mean saving the most expensive part for last (another poor idea in retrospect).

We made our own microphones and sound equipment (poorly), figured out how to do lighting (poorly), and jumped into the deep end.

Let me say this: It was a lot of fun. We had a blast. Every night, hanging out with friends for a purpose. Everyone got involved.

And the end result was a mess.

I use "end result" loosely, seeing as how we never actually finished the film. We had no money, schedules became a problem, and we finally began to see glaring problems in the story.

Jeffery was our hero.

I was the villain (secretly...ohh-hoo!)

We had multiples "agents" from multiples "agencies" all double-crossing and triple-crossing each other for reasons that were unclear even to us.

Tom dyed his bright red hair dark brown so his transparent eyebrows and beard would actually show up on film (a definite plus that came out of this... footage I can show his children in the near future to scare the crap out of them).

The film now exists in a sort of stasis, forever to stay that way. Tom edited it as much as anyone possibly could and filled the blank spaces with text explaining what would have happened during the voids between scenes.

There's no way to finish the movie now (not that any of us see a reason to). It has been five years. People have changed or moved, sets have been destroyed or lost...

And while I sat watching the X-Files movie, full of it's ridiculous story arcs and plot devices, I couldn't help but picture the writers sitting down, saying to themselves, "We've had six years to put this together and put it off until the last weekend. Crap. Maybe we should have attended fewer conventions and played a little less Warcraft."

And I thought to myself, "This would be much better if it were just being screened to a group of giggling friends in a garage somewhere..."