Ta mish beggan skee.

Yes, the singing on Friday went very well — we performed four songs and I only sucked really badly in one of them, and did really well, I think, in another one. The audience was extremely appreciative of the singing and our costumes (yes, for we were dressed up in vaguely Renaissance-type clothing. Very vaguely. My costume was more 14th than 16th century, but nobody appeared to care.) We even got a bit of money, which was more than I knew in advance — enough for a cup of coffee each or so, but still!

The day after I stood up to sing on my own to an audience of people who knew me, which Friday’s audience didn’t. I think this is going to my head.

I had a weird dream last night, involving me developing a phobia against climbing ladders on fire engines and parasailing down from them. So I thought that maybe I should develop my posting from Thursday a little, to say that I am aware of the fact that lots of people really do suffer from phobias for things that seem quite irrational but are very real to them (as I mentioned a few days ago I’m uncomfortable with ferries, although not to the point where I won’t go on them — still, I find it easy to sympathise with sufferes from phobias.) What I was getting at, as those will understand who follow the link and look at the phobia descriptions, was the way the company used the exact same description for all their phobia treatments only changing the name of the phobia, giving us descriptions like this one:

Defined as “a persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of the pope”, each year, this common phobia causes millions of people needless distress.

To add insult to an already distressing condition, most fear of the pope therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient to be exposed repeatedly to the pope over and over again. We believe this is totally unnecessary, and can even make matters worse, now that fear of the pope can be eliminated with just 24 hours of commitment by the phobic individual.

Known by a number of names Papaphobia and Fear of The Pope being the most common, the problem often significantly impacts the quality of life. It can cause panic attacks and keep people apart from loved ones and business associates.

Change “the pope” to “sex”, “parents-in-law”, “the walloons” or even “the preference by a phobic for fearful situations” and you get the picture. I hope they treat their patients with greater respect that they treat the visitors to their web site, for they clearly don’t credit us with the ability to think.

Important message to anybody who wants to send me email: the nea.pp.se address does not work at all at the moment, and I know for a fact it’s lost messages for me this last week. Please use Linnea.Anglemark (bendy a) engelska.uu.se instead for the time being. I’ll kick my email provider guy in the behind and try to make him switch away from home.se as soon as possible.

People occasionally accuse me of not having enough self-confidence. Be that as it may (after all, if I had none I wouldn’t put my thoughts up here for the world to see!) there are things I know about myself, for instance, that my singing voice really isn’t all that good. I can read music rather well, having had a lot of training; I can remember melodies, parts and texts pretty well also but my voice isn’t particularly beautiful. It’s certainly no solo voice, but good enough for choirs, or so I’ve found.

Yet I’m off this afternoon to sing the second alto part in a quartet at an entertainment in southern Stockholm (no, it’s not open. You can’t come. It’s for a society that’s celebrating it’s anniversary, I think). We’ll perform three or four songs I’ve practiced once — last night — fortunately the other three people know them very well. They have been singing together for some time, but their regular second alto couldn’t make it tonight so Sara asked me if I’d like to come instead. As the lowest part in the quartet, I’ll be heard. Fortunately I have no nerves. At all.

Excuse me while I run around in circles, panicking.

You just wait, Jukka — in a week I start learning Manx, and then I’ll write blog postings you can’t understand. So there!

Via Kevan, a list of all phobias that the Phobia Clinic has specially trained staff to deal with. Yes, they would appear to have training to deal with fear of walloons. And gaiety. That Refund phobia is a new one. . . oh, and how much money do you lose every year by being afraid of knees? It affects millions every year!

How unfortunate that they also included their own treatment as one of the phobias to be treated.

I know it is hard to believe, but some people keep their mobile phones for a week, or even longer, before changing to another model! Me, I had a Siemens on Tuesday, a Nokia yesterday, and an Eriksson today.

(Yes, they are still nice and charming at Telia and handing out phones on loan to me. Well, as someone commented, it wasn’t my fault the phone didn’t work when I got it back from the service, so it’s probably only fair.)

So I went to get my mobile phone back, and instead was given a brand new one as they hadn’t been able to repair the old one. Fair enough! Except half the buttons on this one don’t work (the right-hand-side ones) and my entire phone book was wiped out (the latter isn’t the phone’s fault, apparently the phone book isn’t stored on the SIM card, so it’s just a side effect of changing phones.) So now what do I do? Return to the store yet again and say “Erm, sorry, but I can’t press these buttons. . .”??

And home.se is down again. It’s the third time in a week, and the previous week was just as bad. How did they ever get to be elected the best free email service? And when will my email master get his act together and point my email at the working service that I pay for??

Grumble snort. To cap things, Sara and I found out yesterday that we have to write another section to the blasted pragmatics paper we handed in weeks ago, and I do need to get it finished today. At least I can watch the cats watching the snow fall, which is a very watchable spectacle.

Oops — that’s ~10000 editors, not ~1000 like I said in my previous post. I was being a bit bowled over.