I’ve been tagged! And it made me so happy I couldn’t think of anything to say for two weeks. But never mind — better late than never and all that. I think I have to tell you eight things you don’t know about me… or eight weird things… or was it random things? In any case, here are eight plain old things about me.

1) It turns out that, despite what I thought, I am not made out of blogger material. (You have probably figured that one out yourself.) Part of the problem is that when I dreamed this blog up, in the spring of 2004, I literally lived half my life, if not more, in the computer. I worked on it, played on it and talked to my friends on it. By the time I actually got round to making a blog, however –the summer of 2005– my life had changed in a way that meant that I had a lot less energy and computer-time, and the blog fell by the wayside. I do think of it nearly every day, though. Honest.

2) I am still, constantly, ceaselessly amazed by the ways in and the extend to which my family is dysfunctional. (A polite word for fucked up, in this case at least.)

3) I find it very hard to talk about this. Not because I think one shouldn’t talk about such personal things in public –I’d shout it from the rooftops if I could– but because I am worried it will look like I am feeling sorry for myself too much. Oh, and because I wouldn’t know who would want to listen to this stuff.

4) This was supposed to be a blog about ‘growing up, being in love with the world, and indiepop’ after all. Yes, this is its official tagline. No, I didn’t know I had one, either. I filled this in without thinking when I first set wordpress up –in the summer of 2005, in case you’re not paying attention– and then forgot about it until this spring, when I accidentally discovered it again.

5) I was amazed by how accurate this description was, on retrospect. My whole life is about loving the world, growing up, and indiepop.

6) Despite this, and the entry bellow, I remain as ambivalent about indiepop as I have ever been.

7) For example, Horowitz‘s ‘Popkids of the world, unite!’ makes me smile and cringe at the same time. I mean, it is sweet, and catchy as fuck, and –I hope– a reference to Nixon — what is there not to love? Except it has been such a awfully long time since all I wanted was “a happy, happy heart and your cutesy hand in my hand,” and it sounds silly and shallow. And yet, there are moments. There are moments. Like the evening of the Spiral Scratch All-Dayer when we ran away from the Manhattan Love Suicides –too much noise for my liking– only to go stand on the side of the street opposite Electrophonvintage and they looked cuter than anything I had seen in a long long time, and so Swedish that I was instantly transported –with my head spinning and my heart beating fast– to the wondrous summer of 2004. Or those nights like tonight — when the Pines nearly move me to tears — when the way Joe sings ‘somewhere, there were tears that held everything that I wanted to say’ seems to speak of every single ache that has ever resided in my heart.

(The Pines are, in a way, the band that got me into indiepop. It was a gradual process, really, but somewhere in there there is a Pines 7″ that changed my life in ways that it could never had imagined.)

8) Speaking of which: some stranger told me a while ago that the Friends of the Heroes fanzine –which I made, nearly single-handedly, in the summer of 2004– changed his life, in ways that I could never ever had imagined. And to think I have spent the intervening years thinking no one had really cared about the damn thing. And when I think back to it, I feel honoured more than anything else. Humbled, too — that someone opened up their heart to something I made that much. It makes it all worth it. I’d do it all over again in a moment, if I could.

And, as he said, life is very pretty sometimes. Even though –as evident from the list above– mine seems to have stopped sometime in late 2004, early 2005…

PS Oh, yes. I nearly forgot. I fully expect to be ignored, but, well, I tag Martijn, Alistair, Will, Ola, Clismo, and the following blogless people, who are welcome to use my comments box: Marianthi, Georgie and Koen. Just in case they ever read my blog, that is.

PPS Oh and thank you sunbeam for making me feel loved!