August 21.

August 20, Liseberg. First we went on the Helix. I held on with white knuckles and constantly thought engineering, engineering, and still came out shaking and trembling at the end. I couldn’t do the Valkyria with the vertical 50-meter drop after that. Instead, the frisbee swing, just so as not to disappoint my daughter with the fact that I had only done one attraction. On the frisbee swing I particularly learned how important it is to scream.

August 19, Gothenburg with the kids. Because J and I are two people, the amount of things happening in any given moment doubles.

August 18. Tonight Sweden.

August 17. An unusually demanding customer, using products I’m unusually unfamiliar with, in an engagement I was informed about unusually late, in an unusually poorly managed project. Annoying, exhausting day.

August 16. Lying awake, desparate about how empty I feel. J listened to the people around her at the concert she was at on Sunday and felt heartened by how much better our conversations usually are, but I’m not convinced. The irrepressible desire to say something that would otherwise go unsaid, and that gets lost in the general ordinariness, seemingly not worth talking about. It runs on empty. Tonight. Maybe not yesterday, but tonight. If I’m not restless about anything, I get even more restless.

August 15. J thinks it is hard for us to express what is between us because we speak English. I know German and I know that it is not so.

August 14. Audio engineering, and especially the ability to do it fluently and without much detour when needed, is on a similar level of complexity as music itself.

August 13. Salman Rushdie was one of the first authors I became interested in. I had just escaped religion myself and all the commotion had made me curious. So I read The Satanic Verses and was impressed. Such story power.

Fundamentalists cannot accept free thought unless they cease to be fundamentalists. In that sense, they rightly perceive Rushdie as a threat.

For the West, siding with Rushdie is easy. What matters is whether you would defend a person who says things that you yourself find offensive.

August 12. When I chat with my daughter, I commit the same clumsies as my father. By all means, it must be possible to develop a different vocabulary.