She Won’t Talk to Me and That Makes It Worse

This journal has put questions to a fair number of interesting people—musicians, models, bloggers with something to say. Most of them said yes. One has now turned me down twice, and that makes her more interesting than anyone who ever agreed.

Her name is Lisa Olsson. She’s fifteen, Swedish, simultaneously a fashion blogger, a cheerleader, and a model. She’s been in Teen Vogue, has a pronounced thing for American Apparel, and skateboards. I don’t speak a word of Swedish—a recent late-night encounter with two Scandinavian exchange students did absolutely nothing to fix that—and yet I read her blog regularly, parsing context from images, piecing together whatever picture I can.

What I’ve assembled without understanding the language is already substantial. The internet is remarkable that way. If you want to know what she eats for breakfast, her favorite color, or where she got that pink watch, you’ll need to first attempt the sentence "På datorn och på en extern hårddisk" in Swedish—then bookmark her blog and settle in.