Partly a new eye

Early morning last Thursday I went to the special eye hospital. A warm and friendly nurse put a few medical drops in my right eye, and I was transported into the surgery room, where I was dressed up in green textiles, a hole for the eye only. The surgeon told me what he was doing. Anaesthetics around my eye and then a tiny needle right into the eye behind the lens. The needle acted as a vacuum cleaner: it sucked out the glass ball leaving an empty space between the lens and the retina, but it was then filled by a mix of air and a special gas. This new gas ball could, if everything works out fine, change the micro system in the eye, bringing my divided yellow spot (macula) back to one piece again. The gas ball will after a few weeks disappear and the body´s own repair system will replace the glass ball with a new one – and then I will have a partly new eye. During the first days after the operation I have to keep my face down both days and night as the gas ball must not press on to the retina. Soon I will be able to see with my both eyes again.

By age you will be reminded of…

…the life clock: tic tac, tic tac, tic tac. After around 750 000 hours it is all over for the individual. If you happen to become long-lived. Tic tac, tic tac, tic tac. No matter what you do, what you eat. At around 60-70 years of age there are some alarm clocks sounding: This is no longer possible. That is beyond your possibilities.
I am soon going to become a patient at a day surgery hospital. The operation will probably last one hour, not more. After that they will bring me a cup of coffee, give me some instructions, and then I will be allowed to go home, head down, face down.
Face down? Yes, because otherwise my right eye will not heal as expected.
I have a hole in my yellow spot, or my macula. They are going to empty the glass ball in my eye and fill it with some gas.
Well, it is just another alarm clock. Hear, hear: it gives me a ring.
Tic tac, tic tac, tic tac….
Life is dramatically wonderful – and quite short.
You´d better not postpone everything until tomorrow.
Do it now!
The clock is ticking…

This is a difference

If you ever will visit Bangkok I suggest a ride on the subway. It is cool, clean and efficient. At every station the authorities have built safe screens or walls of glass in order to eliminate the risk of falling down on the railway. There are glass sliding doors exactly on the sites of the train doors and they open automatically when the train doors open up. On board the train you will hardly find any graffitti, nor any other scratches or marks on the windows, nor on the seats, nor on the walls. Everything is clean and people are just sitting or standing there in silence or by small talking to each other.
It is indeed quite a difference comparing to the Stockholm subway lines. Glass walls or screens at the stations would immediately become damaged by all graffitti artist-terrorists, who would attack them by paint or by sharp needles or whatever. Inside the Stockholm trains you´d better watch out since the seats are more or less dirty from all shoes that have been put there. A Thai citizen would never put his shoes on a common seat made for common people as this is regarded as a severe insult to others. But in Sweden, and in many other countries as well, a lot of people, young ones and adults seem not to care.
There are some similarities between Scandinavian and Thai cultures, but there are even more differences. Very big differences. Try to compare and try your best to evaluate what you like the most. And try to understand why there are so big differences between Scandinavian and Thai behaviour.

The King’s colour is yellow

No, I am not referring to the King of Sweden, and I am not referring to any other kingdom in Europe. I am thinking of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, a most admired and beloved monarch. There is no question about it: a vast majority of Thai people is looking at the King as the great, personal symbol of a great nation, and they are gratefully paying their respect to the ageing man on the throne. Last year, in 2006, Thailand celebrated that the King had reigned for 60 years, and almost all people dressed up in yellow, particularly on Mondays due to the fact that the King was born on a Monday. This year, in December, the King will be 80 years of age, and the yellow T-shirts, or the yellow blouses, or the yellow ties, or the special yellow bracelets could still be seen everywhere in Thailand, especially on Mondays.
I try to imagine if someone would dare to come up with the idea of paying respect to the Swedish king by suggesting that the Swedes could dress up in…green, or grey or whatever, but such a suggestion would most probably be met by a big laugh. People in Thailand belong to an old, rich and blessed dependency culture, where you do not hesitate to share the national core values with everyone around you. In that sense everyone (of course with exceptions) gather around a center, creating a sense of affiliation and belongingness. The yellow dressed man or woman is a part of Thailand, a part of Thai culture and a part of a social entity.
In Sweden you have to fight for your identity and you have to struggle to find out if you belong to someone or something, or if you are completely alone and outside everything. The Swedish king could be nice to look at, but it is much more common to make jokes about him than to openly state that he is a good man doing a very good job for Sweden as a nation.
Being a Swede is not so easy these days.

Full of impressions

I am just about to leave Bangkok after a few days, most of them having been in the lecturers position for advanced staff in the prestigious THAI Airways International Company. As always I have deeply appreciated the Thai peoples way of how to treat “farangs” (foreigners) as well as their own countrymen, particularly people in my own age. I am full of positive impressions and I honestly must admit that Thai people in general are even more well mannered than most people from my own country. This is for sure an effect of a social development that to a certain extent has passed our own in my homeland. I will soon be back with more thoughts from my experiences from Thailand, a country that I have continuosly visited during forty years.

In order to get an identity…

…you have to have the possibility to identify yourself with someone, or someones, or something outside yourself. In our present society you can easily find that quite a lot of people have some problems with this. Some people, both young ones and adults, show symptoms of confusions and desillusions, claiming that they do not know who they are, meaning that they have not got any clear pictures of anyone or anything outside themselves to cling to. Quite a lot of other people are giving expressions of having a lot of problems identifying themselves with the present society, its goals and its leading politicians. Instead they choose to cling to smaller groups within the society such as football fan teams, or special New Age influenced churches, or criminal gangs, or other quite odd groups or modern tribes. And other people try to look upon their own bodies as the salvation parts for their minds: they are spending hours and days and weeks in the gym to overdo all muscles, or to trim down some otherwise normal body shapes, and they are convinced that this is the road to success. All these aspects are symptoms of a society in need of a much, much more clear goal, a much, much more clear leadership. You – and I – have plenty of things to do if we want to contribute to some changes to the better…