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Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2002-02-06

Two and a half minutes.

Ola was sitting straight across from me, fretting and constantly keeping his gaze on the time on his watch. When you wait, five minutes is never really five minutes. They’re more like fifteen or in some rare cases even more. But five? Never. Not unless you’re only supposed to wait for one minute, then one can be like five. Time is not an exact science, no matter what the current theory is. Time have a mind its own, working against everyone at the same time.

Beside me Niklas was trying to study, so was I but he was better on that than I was. It was he who inflicted the “don’t quote Monty Python for five minutes”-penalty on Ola after a quoting killing spree moments earlier. Apart from writing “Dinsdale” on the display of his cell phone, he made it.

Three minutes.

I wrote “Typically, the beginning of a word is joined with the end of another. Ex: smoke + fog = smog” with my new pen. Damn nice pen too, transparent in places and with rubber strategically planted where one holds the fingers.

Four minutes, ten seconds

We who were there to study discussed what kind of word formation processes lay behind the word “car-phone,” or we tried to despite interruptions from the man with his eyes directed downwards to his watch.

“Could you two be quiet? Some of us are trying to get things done.” He looked at us and then continued to study the effects of time. He looked as if he was soon going into withdrawal.

Five minutes

“Wait for it!” The watch beeped.

“Perhaps you should try it with ten minutes now?” I laughed at the remark. Ola shook his head violently.

“I shouldn’t think so.”

In retrospect, it was Three Men in a Boat, except that we didn’t have a dog and we weren’t in a boat at all. I (Harris in the book) didn’t get a lot of people lost in a maze and turned them into a lynch mob with the stakes pointing at me, and Ola (George in the book) didn’t try to open a tin of pineapples with a pair of scissors and almost put his eye out while doing so. So, except both the small and the big details it was spot on.