On stuffophilia

So, it's one of those days...

Zombie White (and no Huntsman)

I *really* want these origami speakers. In addition to being awesome in the capacity of being ORIGAMI SPEAKERS (!), they also sound pretty cool sound-wise. Want.

(Also, from this fabulously awesome site I might be addicted to now ((designfetish.org)), it is worth checking out the posts about people as pixels, the Pixar minimalistic poster series, and not to mention Zombie Attack Barbie. Once she's through with Ken, she can have a go at Snow White...) 

I don't really believe the following really happened, but that's sort of the point, isn't it...

(I wish it were true, though. Bill Murray FTW)

I have inherited from my grandfather a clock (of the mantel variety) that require a deposit of 1 krone (though unfortunately not the currently used version) per week to power it, like a savings arrangement. I don't have a picture or link, but I felt the mentioning of it belonged in this post.

*snort*

I know someone whose potential wedding cake should look like this, but I am not going to tell him because I don't want him to think I am making suggestions... (You know who you are and if you are reading this: I am not. Making suggestions. I am reading it. After having written it. Checking for typoes. Probably missing a few.)

Also, I looked up "who's" versus "whose" for the umpteenth time. And now I looked up umpteenth... Gah. 



Aaaaand one more posting from designfetish(I think I might have one, yes).org:

It's a GUMMY BEAR DRESS!!! OMD - could I pull it off? Probably not, but I could eat it off! Ha! I made a funny! 

And now I need to get off the internet, or at the very least go back to Facebook lurking. Laters, taters!

On Decisions and the City

...as I walked down the streets of the forlorn city, I couldn't help but wonder: have the 21st century made us unable to make independent decisions?

I've been watching a lot of Sex and the City lately. Carrie Bradshaw surely must be one of the great philosophers of our time. At least she manages what other philosophers fail at: presenting a world view that makes sense to me, from which I can try to make sense of my own confusing life.

Using Carrie & CO as a reference point is fun - and disturbing. Is he a Mr. Big? Or an Aidan? And am I a Carrie or a Miranda? A Charlotte? Or - at times - a Samantha, even? And most importantly of all - do I need this many shoes? (Of course I do!)

I realize it is fiction, and I realize that the life of four glamorous 30-somethings in New York City does not translate well to my own 20-something life here in boring, old Oslo. Still. There are some things that appear to be universal, and Carrie the Philosopher offers some interesting perspectives on that great mystery women have been trying to figure out since the beginning of time: the man. Who is he? How to approach him? And why do we (as in "we, women") have so many twisted expectations for him, and the life we want him to provide for us? (Which, I might add in this "female power"-inspired post, I find completely ridiculous. First you need to provide your own life, find your own goal and become a confident, independent person. Then you can find a guy who is compatible with this life and this person you've become. Or at least that sounds more ideal than changing for the guy; or worse: expecting him to change for you. Change might be good, but it is at the very least unlikely.)

Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and to a certain extent, Charlotte, are confident, independent women (though with the mandatory confidence issues and hiccups like the rest of us). (And - yes - I realize they might not be realistic characters, but instead stereotypes. That is a whole different discussion, though.)

Independence is a virtue in the 21st century, even (or especially) for women. And yet - this is my claim - we frequently find ourselves unable to act independently. The SatC-girls have a touch of it - no problem is left unturned in their famous NYC brunches. They debate and discuss everything from penis sizes to the exchange of keys with new boyfriends. They depend on the advice from friends to make their decisions.

This is not a bad thing, but with modern technology comes modern problems. We no longer have to preserve our problems for Sunday brunch - our advisors are present 24/7 through Facebook, Twitter, or cell phones. Earlier today I found myself consulting a friend about a rather mundane topic. I won't go in details (despite it being mundane, it would also be too self-incriminating to mention here...), but the point is that it made me realize I've forgotten the ability to make decisions all by myself. My recent experiment to ensure that I still am able to function properly without Facebook IV directly plugged to my arteries (I managed four days completely off, and I missed it surprisingly little), forced me to make certain smaller decisions - what to wear or whether to eat bread or yoghurt for breakfast; things like that - without consulting my team of online specialists.

I'm only exaggerating a little.

I remember watching an episode of House, M. D. once (a show I am sad to see cancelled, even though I don't watch it myself anymore, since it made me a total hypochondriac), where a patient was an enthusiastic blogger. She was up for a sugery to have her heart valve replaced (I think. Not entirely sure what the surgery was, come to think of it). In order to make the decision of whether or not to have the surgery, she consulted her blog readers.

The episode was supposed to show a crazy example. Who would do something like that? Ask random strangers on the Internet to make life or death decisions?

The scary thing, though, was that the thought of doing just that wasn't so foreign to me. Okay, I wouldn't consult whomever reading this for questions about my health, but that is more a matter of privacy. Communication and consultation with others, through blogging or Facebook or whatnot has become so common that I don't immediately see the problem even though I know there's supposed to be one.

I think once I have identified the problem, though, my conclusion is different than the House-writers probably planned. They wanted to say something about the crazy online society we've constructed. I want to say something about society in general.

A hundred years ago my ancestors lived in the deep Norwegian forests, not being able to communicate with friends or relatives every second of every day. If they were lucky they probably saw one another once every ten years or so. I can assure you they did not have problems making decisions! Because part of the issue here isn't just that we make ourselves dependant on someone else - no, adding to that problem is the fact that most of us make ourselves dependant on several someones. And trust me - if I ask my team of online consultants what to wear or what to eat for breakfast, I will get more than one answer! I'm asking them to make my decisions easier, but in reality they often only provide more options, thus making it even harder!

Let's pretend this post isn't as long as it is, and that you've actually bothered reading all the way down to the bottom. There is a life lesson down here, somewhere. Something to do with Facebook, perhaps - how being away was good, and being back is good, and that somewhere in the middle probably is the golden direction to take. Something to do with how I communicate - of remembering that sometimes having all the options and making a qualified decision isn't the rational choice, if nothing else because it takes too much time. And something about Sex and the City. It's not a perfect show, and the philosophy is definitely not perfect. But it is comforting, entertaining.

As I wrote the last few words towards completion of this strange and confusing post, I couldn't help but wonder: has our inability to make decisions led us to accept a philosophy based on product placement and idealized lifestyles to excuse our otherwise chaotic existence? Yes. Yes it has. Stop asking rhetorical questions.

On heresay

I'm not here.

Oh, don't you worry. I don't mean literally. Well, actually, I do. Assuming that "here" is defined by where you are at the moment, since you are reading it, and a text automatically belongs to the reader once it has left the authors hand (or so the post-structuralists say) (or maybe they don't say that, but bear with me) (in fact, don't. I'm not here. As the author of this text I am dead, post-structurally speaking, and I am also physically not in the same place as you, real-world-istically speaking. Unless you also happens to sit on a train on the way to Oslo. But I highly doubt that.)

I'm on a train to Oslo. This train may or may not have wifi - I don't know that now (now being the time of writing of this text), even if I will know by the time "now" becomes now (now being the time of you reading this text, since that realistically have to be at least eight hours after I write it, since that is when I am scheduling it for). Regardless of whether I know now or "now" if my train has wifi, though, that still won't interfere with my statement "I am not here", because I still will have written and scheduled this post now (before), and not now (after). So I am not - physically, obviously, but also metaphysically and mentally - here, if "here" is the blog, or the place from which you are reading this blog, or perhaps the Internet in general. I'm not there. Here. Whereorwhatever.

It's complicated, I know. Barthes and Derrida would have been proud. Except for the fact that I am making a thorough effort to place myself in the text by defining myself out of it, so in fact it seems as though I am here, now, even if I claim that I am not. Instead, I will claim I am elsewhere. On the train, yes, you already know that. On my way to Oslo. To where a job (a job!) is awaiting. A temporary job, but still. You will be free of the endless complaints of my unemployedness for a few weeks, at least. Hooray!

But also. My intention for defining myself out of this text by stating the obvious "I am not here", was not simply to confuse you or make you question my presence/existence/mental state. I meant to direct your attention towards the places where I do define myself as present. Such as the Burrow blog, where I have written a slightly less (but not by much) silly post that this one. It won't post till noon GMT, so if you are looking for me there before then you won't find me. I'll still be on the train, of course.

The other place, however, I wanted to direct your attention to, is here - in a sense - but it is here in a past "now". In yesterday's now in fact. The now that was (is!) a now when I wrote (am writing!) this. Yesterday I wrote a much more sensible post about an important topic I feel the need to share again. So, if you're tired of looking for me here, you might as well go here to find a more serious me.

In the meantime I need to get off this train and try to figure out where I am and what I'm supposed to do here. It is not unlikely that it might involve the death of the author.

On radio silence

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the availability we create for ourselves by constantly being online, having our cell phones on at all times and generally being easy to contact wherever, whenever? 

I do. The remedy is often to log off for a little while, for instance going for a solitary walk without bringing any electronic equipment. The world will just have to accept that you are not available for a while. Sometimes it takes a little longer – if someone had offered me two weeks in a cabin in a remote location where no internet could reach me, I would have accepted immediately. I would have brought a cell phone in case of an emergency, but I think I would have switched it off for the most of the time to experience something I haven’t really done in years (if ever) – complete radio silence. With no one to talk to, no Facebook statuses to “like”, no text messages to reply to, I believe that my mind and my imagination would get a much-deserved and needed break. A complete disconnection from the world might be exactly what I need to recharge my own batteries.

Now, the chances of being offered this cabin is slim (the chances of it existing at all is slim, in the age of satellites and wireless connections anywhere in the world), but there is nothing stopping me from attempting radio silence right here in my own apartment. Nothing but my own will.

Because the one thing most frequently interfering with my intentions to take a break from the world is myself. I can’t seem to stop checking my email, “just one more time”; or refreshing Facebook to see if anything new happened; or scroll down one of the newspapers I follow just to make sure that Lady Gaga hasn't done anything crazy the last ten minutes. Even if I turn off my phone and unplug the internet and lock the door, I would still consider sitting down to write a blog post intended for others to read. Interaction has become an integral part of my life, and it seems almost impossible to cut it out. The task, then, is to keep it to a manageable level.

Because the reason I don’t unplug the internet isn’t that I can’t, it is that I won’t. After all I like the interaction. Even if I occasionally have to duck away from people, online and offline, to preserve my sanity, I wouldn’t want to become a hermit full time (not even one with internet access). Perhaps I should strive to take a week or two off a year, though, just to prove to myself I can?

As you all should know (since I’m constantly complaining about it), the final deadline for my MA thesis is coming up. I survived NaBloWriMo thinking I would not blog much in November, but nevertheless post every now and then, since I do have a few spare posts written. However, even if these posts are written, I realized that I shouldn't post them just yet. Until I have passed the deadline for my thesis, I have other things to do. It wouldn't feel right to post just for the sake of posting, when it is becoming increasingly apparent to me (and everyone else, I suspect) that I don't have the time or stamina to keep up with comments, both here and on other blogs. I miss being an active participant in the blogosphere, but until I have a little more spare time and brain power, I don't see the point of keeping up this half-mode I've succumbed to. Thus I am evoking radio silence. I am going to the dark side of the moon, and I won’t be back in Earth orbit for a few weeks (I’m thinking December).

Wish me luck – both in finishing the thesis and in staying true to my resolution of radio silence – I’m frankly not sure which one will be the hardest.

See you on the flip side! 

On browsing browsers

Dear Firefox,

We’ve been together for a while now, though we never said we’d be exclusive. I must confess I am still seeing I.E. behind your back. Yes, on the other computer. After all, I only went with you on this one because you were supposed to be faster. So far you haven’t really lived up to my expectations, and I’m beginning to wonder if faster really is better…

In light of my continuing affair with I.E., I thought it was time we talked about what is good about this relationship. And what is not. Perhaps if you change, I’d be willing to stay with you. Until then I don’t really see a future for you and me.

To start with your good sides, I really like that you are considerate of my needs and wants. When you first asked me if I wanted to “close and save tabs” or just “close” the browser, it made me feel really special – like a princess. After the 874,766th time, however, I think it is high time that you learn that I don’t really want to save the tabs I close for next time I open the browser. When I close something, I close it. I don’t want to save. Yes, I do realize that I can ask you not to ask, but I really wanted you to figure it out for yourself.

(By the way, I don’t mind when I.E. asks me if I want to re-open any closed tabs whenever I open a new tab. He just has better timing than you. After all, it is more likely that I want to open the same tab several times within the same browsing session than that I want to reopen them hours later.)

I like your memory. I think it is cute that I only have to type a few letters, and you recall any website I’ve visited. The problem is, I also find it slightly disturbing. It’s like you’re monitoring me. Sometimes I just want to ask for a little space. I.E. is much more discreet about this. The whole star-thing doesn’t really work like I.E.’s favourites. He knows what sites I like. When you make me assign stars, I feel like an elementary school teacher. I hate not being able to give stars to everyone.

I guess there were a few things I didn’t like mixed in with the ones I like. You just make me feel ambiguous like that. I haven’t yet decided if it’s a good thing.

As for the bad things, there are a few. There is no easy way of saying this, so I’m just going to jump right in.

I hate – HATE – your uncooperativeness when it comes to Blogger. I realize that the two of you don’t get along very well. I get that sometimes the chemistry just isn’t right. But as long as Blogger is important to me, it should be important to you too. So I suggest you try a little harder. Don’t block the Google Friend request (I.E. manages just fine, just so you know it). Don’t mess up my formatting when I want to paste a blog post from Word into Blogger. And don’t stop me from posting altogether. It has happened a few times. You know what I talk about. It makes me so frustrated!

Finally, I just can’t get used to how you have the "refresh" and "home" buttons on the wrong side of the top page bar. It just looks weird.

As long as things remain like this, I’m sorry to have to tell you that I.E. is still my “standard program”. I just can’t see myself changing that anytime soon. It’s all in your hands now. I know it must sound cold-hearted since I am the one who strayed, but I honestly don’t think this is my fault. If we are going to make this work, you have to change.

Yours (only partly) truly,
Cruella.

On(line) stumbling

I am a world class procrastinator. I can spend endless amounts of time checking emails (I've got more than one to check), Facebooks (there is only one Facebook I am checking, but with multiple account syndrome this keeps me occupied in plural as well), blogs (are you detecting a pattern?), online newspapers and so on. The time wasting opportunities online are nearly endless. However, if by chance no one updates their Facebook for an hour or two, if no new emails find their way into my inbox or if all the blogs are read; there is one website that never runs out of interesting things for me to watch.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/ allows you to click and click and click and each time a new, interesting website pops up, one that falls into one of several pre-elected categories of your choice. During one session of stumbling, I can find such different things as

1) A recipe for the world's best egg rolls (their words, not mine).

2) This photograph:

and this one:

3) A video of the band MUSE who were forced to lip synch at an Italian television performace. As a protest, the band members switched instruments and generally made a very unconvincing performace (notice the ironic grin on the "vocalist's" face when he sings "They will not control us"...)





4) A website with various tips for writers, from beginner to professional.

5) The Tone Matrix - which is a highly addictive sound-music-chessboardy-vibration-xylophonish thingie that MUST be tested, but not in a place where you can annoy others with the sound... Only play in company if they can be amazed (they will be).

6) An online software that allows you to speed read (or spreed - I already like this thingie because it is a made-up word. Yay!), or, as I did, test how fast you are able to read. It's quite interesting. I found that I still read faster in Norwegian than in English. In Norwegian I could still follow the text perfectly at 600 words/minute, while it got tricky at 650/minute. In English I started having problems at about 550/minute. Note that the spreeder doesn't reflect my actual reading speed - I certainly read slower than this in real life.

7) Another video - this time some pretty darn incredible tap dancers. How this is humanly possible is beyond me...




I could go on, because there is always more to stumble upon at stumbleupon.com, but I think I have left you with enough oddities for one Friday. Happy weekend!

On Twitter

Twitter has been one of those things I have loved to hate without ever having really tried it (much like the Twilight series, or Roquefort cheese). From what I had heard about Twitter, it seemed clear to me that it only was a more public and less personal Facebook, it was just another time waster (in which the web already offers too many for my own good), and the limitation of 140 characters appeared to me to be one of the safest ways of ensuring “chat speak”, which I loathe.


However fond I was of my Twitter prejudices, I decided that it was beneath me to continue to discard a worldwide phenomenon that doubtlessly has an impact with its more than 100 million users (a handful of whom I happen to know, so they can’t all be twits [sorry, I’ve been dying to use that sometime…]). I no longer wanted to discard it without knowing what I was discarding. So I decided to sign up for Twitter.

In a way.

As I only intended this to be a temporary experiment, I didn’t really want my Twitter account to be “me”. I did not want to connect to my friends, to start tweeting and then discover that this was the way life should be. I did not want to end up loving Twitter. I only wanted to know why I hated it.

Thus, I signed up with a fake name, fake birthday, fake everything. If you sometime in the last few weeks have been followed by a stranger whose tweets sound oddly familiar, it isn’t me. I deliberately avoided following anyone I knew, because I did not want to get pulled in. I may have peeked at your profile (mwahahaha!), but I didn’t follow it. I acknowledge that this isn’t doing Twitter justice, because any social media becomes fun only when there is interaction (hence the social part). But what I wanted was simply to get a feel for what the hype was all about, and that I did.

At first a few of my prejudices were confirmed. Language wise, Twitter can be annoying. One example that continued to baffle me was that topics that “trended” (from what I gathered “Twitter trends” are keywords often repeated in tweets), frequently had rather obvious spelling errors in them. This either means that a significant number of Twitter users didn’t know how to spell these words, or that a significant number of them didn’t care and spelled it incorrectly on purpose because this was an up-and-coming hashtag (keywords with an # in front of it). Neither alternative bodes well for Twitter’s influence on language.

That being said, Twitter also has a large number of users who seem to interpret the 140 character limitation as a challenge to squeeze an impressing amount of information in the form of quality writing into each tweet. Even though also these users sometimes have to employ certain abbreviations (“PLZ RT” seems unavoidable), it is comforting to know that there exists a Twitter that doesn’t fck w ur spllng (LOL).

That Twitter can be a time waster is without any shed of doubt. But then again, what isn’t? You can claim all you want that you only signed up for Facebook for networking purposes and that your blog serves 100% as a window to the world that one day will lead you to a publishing contract. However, until you prove to me that you haven’t at least once clicked on an old high school friend’s photo album just out of curiosity, or that one or two of the blogs you visit regularly serve no other purpose than to entertain you, I will not listen to a word you say.

Thus, Twitter can waste your time. But Twitter can also be a useful tool to find and connect with people who share your interests in whatever field that may be, it can be a way of keeping up with news, and it can be a great way of promoting yourself. The reason? Twitter’s simplicity. Anyone can tweet, and anyone can retweet. The second you have one single person retweeting a link you posted, it means that all of his/her followers have the chance to visit the link as well.

The prejudice of mine that crashed most profoundly, however, is that Twitter is just a (poorer) version of Facebook. Twitter is nothing like Facebook. Even though you can customize both your Facebook and Twitter experience, Facebook is by nature much more personal, for better and for worse. For two people to be “friends” on Facebook it takes mutual acceptance. On Twitter you can follow anyone, regardless of whether they are following you (even though there is a possibility of keeping tweets private. This seems slightly pointless considering the purpose of Twitter, but whatever floats your tweet…). This means that I get to read tweets by people who never in a million years would have friended me on Facebook. I even get to interact with them by the simple use of an @ in front of whatever tweet I want them to see. Useful? Mnwellno – maybe. Fun? Definitely.

Another thing about Twitter which separates it from Facebook is that it is highly topicized (yes, I know that isn’t a word, but “categorized” just didn’t do it for me today). Because of the aforementioned hashtags you can search specifically for tweets about topics that interest you. If butterfly collecting is your thing, I am sure you can find someone tweeting about it, without having to look through the status updates of butterfly collectors who happened to only write about what they had for breakfast this one particular day (which could be the case if you friended them on Facebook).

I like Facebook because it is a casual way of catching up with friends. I suppose you could do that on Twitter as well, but either you would have to be prepared to do it in public or you would have to write a personal message (and if you’re doing that, you might as well send an email). Thus for that purpose Twitter does not seem as apt. Twitter appears to be best when you have a specific agenda. It doesn’t matter if that agenda is praising Justin Bieber (who should need no further introduction since it appears to be impossible to be on Twitter without hearing about him) or promoting your blog. The domino effect Twitter can create seems unmatched by Facebook. For instance I noticed that the topics trending often were important news stories. This bodes well for the world, people! Twitter users care about Gaza, and not just Justin Bieber!

Another (rather random) thing I noticed during my twitttaffair was that John Cleese follows 150-something twitterers (tweeters?), and a completely disproportionate number of those were from Norway. I do know that the man likes a good old Norwegian Blue, but why in the world..? These were seemingly normal Norwegians, who for some reason had their tweets followed by Mr. Cleese. Any clarification as to why Cleese prefers Norwegians would be helpful. Thanks. (And before you ask – no, he does not follow me. Naturally I did not use Norway as location for my fake Twitter persona!)

In the end, my undercover experiment taught me to accept Twitter rather than liking it (which I never will, I think) or hating it (which I don’t anymore). I might in the future consider opening a real Twitter account, one where I contact actual friends; follow people I actually want to follow as opposed to Aston Cutcher (ooops, did that give me away? Yeah, it might, but you’d have to look through 5 million followers to find the correct fake me); and actively try to network rather than “fakework” which I largely did this time. If I ever get a book to promote, for instance, I do see why (and now how) Twitter can be useful. In the meantime I intend to continue to stay away.

On scrambled eggs (not really)

I’m fighting a(nother!) cold and I’ve got a lot of my mind (including a troublesome drabble I am trying to write for the June 2010 Burrow feature which we are launching tomorrow – you should check it out [tomorrow, on June 1st that is] on www.the-burrow.org,) so this will be a short post. It’s unavoidable to mention one of the other things on my mind since the Burrow also launches another event tomorrow – it’s the GO! date for the BuNoWriMo. If you haven’t joined yet, you should check it out (the logo in the top right corner of this page will take you directly there). We are currently at 90 members – that means 90 people who will help YOU write a novel in June (if you let us) – and there is room for plenty more!


What I really wanted to post today, though, is something that has to do with my Saturday post. I won’t give you a full review of the Eurovision show (because, let’s face it, the artistic highlights were few), but there is one thing from the show I wanted to share.

The pause act in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest was surprisingly good, it was different than it usually is (actually, it was different than anything I’ve ever seen). Watching this live made me remember what people can do when they get together and work towards a mutual goal, and this is also an example of a happening that would not have been possible without the help of modern technology. The music starts about 50 seconds in, and I highly recommend watching at least a couple of minutes to get an idea what is really going on here (actually, just watch the whole thing. It’s really cool!).




One final comment on Eurovision and I swear I won’t mention it again for a year… Did you know that if you google “men in silver hotpants” in Australia my blog comes up as one of the top hits? I know this because a considerable of the hits I had over the weekend came from Aussies looking for the good stuff in really short shorts…

On BuNoWriMo

I’ve been in a partly self-imposed “no-blog-mode” lately (partly, because there also have been things out of my control that kept me away; like moving, and no internet at the new place the first few days, and family commitments, and an intense obsession with the show “How I Met Your Mother”…). I realized that if I ever was to make my June 1st deadline for the next chapter of my thesis I had to stop spending so much time complaining online about how slow my progress was. Also, since my funny mood as of late has been continuing (and the only thing I really want to do when I’m in that mood is to go hermit, which I now have the luxury of doing in my own home), I didn’t feel like gracing the internet with my presence.


I have gotten some work done on my chapter (yay!), I have gotten installed in my new apartment (yay!) and I have internet again (y… nay? Yay-but-with-a-hestitation-because-I-know-this-will-slow-my-progress-down-nay?). While I fully intend to retreat back to hermit mode as soon as this is written (only interrupted by the hours I have to be at work), I did have a reason to type this today. June 1st is a big day, not just because I get to say bye-bye to my chapter for a few days (wish I could say for life…), but also because that is the day that the Burrow is launching this year’s greatest event – BuNoWriMo! It’s gonna be LEGEND – wait for it – DARY! (I really have watched too much “HIMYM”…)

Those of you who have been suffering with me for a while will know that back in November I allowed myself to be talked into participating in NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo (short for National[though it has long since become international] Novel Writing Month) takes place every year in November. The purpose of NaUhmHowDoYouSpellItAgain is to write a novel of 50 000 words in just one short month. It’s crazy, and yet it is also quite efficient, since the short time frame and the support of other participants really make it seem possible (and it is – in 2008 more than 21 000 participants managed to complete the task). Last year many of my blogging friends, including several members of the Burrow (my writing group, which I am sure by now most of you know all about) participated. A few of them proved that it is possible to write a novel in one month. Some proved that participating in NaWhatWasIt was the kick-start they needed to finish a novel shortly thereafter. And some of us proved that November really is a sucky month to try to achieve the impossible; especially if you are working in retail where the holiday season in crazy as it is, if you are working in or taking any kind of education where November often is terribly busy because of pending exams, and especially especially if you are doing both (yours truly). I never finished my NaNoWiP in November, and it’s been hanging around on my hard drive ever since, feeling sulky and abandoned.

Since the Burrow experienced a certain amount of success in last year’s NaNoI’mNotGonnaTryToThinkOfMoreCleverWaysOfSpellingItFromNowOn, it was suggested that we should try to host our own novel writing month. After all, if it is possible to write a whole novel during one month, in theory you should be able to write eleven more that year, right…? While twelve-a-year might be a stretch, a second one-month-written novel should definitely be possible to achieve. And since we’re the ones hosting it, we get to decide when. June was much more convenient for several of us, and so it was decided. We even made our own catchy name (with a few elements borrowed from the original) – BuNoWriMo.

To make the experience even more fun (if you can call giving labour to an elephant fun, which is the best comparison I have at the moment to how momentous the idea of writing anything at all feels, after having struggled with this ruddy chapter for way too long) and rewarding (after all, who wouldn’t want to become an author – I am sure they all make as much money as Dan Brown) – (I just completely killed that sentence and impossibilized ending it in the fashion I had planned... Let me try again…)

To make the experience even more fun and rewarding we are inviting others. That is right, others, that means you! There are not a lot of rules (the normal NaNoHingISaidIWouldn’tDoThisAgain rules apply, except that we’re starting June 1st and finishing on June 30th. We’re not terribly strict on rules, though, as will be clarified below). The only unabandonable rule is that you have to have a Facebook account to participate, as we figured making a separate message board/website/physical-access-point-equally-easily-accessible-from-anywhere-in-the-world was too much of a hassle. Thus we are doing all the motivational group dances and such from the BuNoWriMo Facebook Group. Anyone can join, but we are at the moment asking people to request invites to make sure that the organizational phase goes as smoothly as possible (actually, it is so that we can be sure that Stephenie Meyer doesn’t join. Just kidding. No, I’m not. I think I am). This means that you kind of have to have a Facebook account to participate, but I don’t think it means you have to be/become our Facebook friend (though you can, if you want to. I’m trying to be inclusive here…). One suggestion from Tami over at Confessions of a Watery Tart is that you create a pen name Facebook account if you don’t want to mix your personal profile with your secret novel writing alias (or, you know, if you are Stephenie Meyer).

Finally, if you’re thinking that you’re not up for writing a whole novel in June, or if you are wishing that you instead of being asked to start a new project could just get some motivation to finish an old one, this is also the place for you. We love our rebels in the Burrow, and just as NaNoNoNoStop!Please! offers a route for those who just want to join in but not stick to the rules, so do we. Personally I struggle with finishing things, not beginning them. So I thought this might be a good opportunity to finish last year’s NaNoSeriouslyNotDoneYet?WorkInProgress. I’m starting at 15 000 words. If I end at 65 000 that would be awesome, but I would be very happy if I touch the 50 000 mark as well. Frankly, I’d be happy to get anything written at all. I’m hoping that the community spirit, the locked time frame and the brief pause from my thesis might be just what I need to get cracking.

So, have I convinced you yet? If you, or someone you know, or even Stephenie Meyer, have a desire to join in on the fun (and stress and panic and anger and sleeplessness and back pains and caffeine addiction), contact me or any of the other Burrow members with your Facebook account name, and an invitation shall be sent in your general direction.



The BuNoWriMo logo is designed by Joris Ammerlaan, who can be reached at "jorisammerlaan at gmail dot com"

On knowing someone (or not actually knowing them at all)

You’ve all had the feeling – you thought you knew someone, and then – like a bolt from the blue – they do a 360 degrees on you and you have no idea who this person is after all. I’ve recently had this happen to me. Worse, I was not able to confront the person in question, since he died some 30 years ago. At least that is what I thought…


I realize this needs clarification. Alright, let me try. In the work of my master’s thesis [oh, bejeezles, is she going to start complaining about that again?!? Shut. The. Bagpipes. Up. And. JUST! WRITE!], I’ve read many documents written by people important for the tiny part of history I am focusing on. Some of these people you probably know, seeing as they were important also in a larger context, as Presidents and Prime Ministers in the not too distant past. John F. Kennedy, for instance, is a name I expect will bring out certain memories and images whether you were born in Toledo, Tokyo or Togo. The preexistent ideas we have about people of JFK’s caliber can make it difficult to remain neutral (if that is even a goal, but don’t get me started on post modern historiography).

Most of the time, however, it isn’t the personal notes of Kennedy or Eisenhower or Lyndon B. Johnson I get to read. I read about them, sure, but the day-to-day handling of the specific area of American foreign policy I am interested in (US peace initiatives in the Middle East between 1956 and 1967, in case I haven’t mentioned it before. I have. But you may not have read it. Or cared) didn’t often make it to the President’s desk. It may not even have made it to the Secretary of State’s desk. In the long run a policy is often to a large extent formed by the lower-level officials in the Department.

These are the ones I am surrounded by on a daily basis. These are people who aren’t particularly famous, at least not many of them (though some went on to do greater things later). These are names I had never even heard of only a year ago, but that I now have read so many letters and memos and telegrams and notes to and from that they almost feel like personal acquaintances. I start recognizing patterns – one has a particular way of sugaring pills, another has a tendency to always play the devil’s advocate. I can’t help but try to imagine what they were really like in real life, and before I know it I am no longer neutral to these guys (always guys, by the way. I have so far encountered one single woman in the hundreds of documents I’ve read, and she was a secretary). Based on my impression of these people from these old documents they wrote of records of meetings they attended, I even make up nicknames for some of them. One, his real name shall remain unrevealed for obvious reasons, is currently only known to me as “The Cold-Hearted Bagpipe” (I don’t usually say bagpipe, though…).

The neutrality issue set aside, it is relatively unproblematic that I make up these little stories about the people who otherwise would only be names on an old piece of paper. It is unproblematic because the events I am reading (and occasionally writing) about happened 40-50 years ago. Most of the people involved are long dead. Or so I thought.

I google most of the names that reoccur often enough for me to notice. The reason I do this is both because it is useful for me to know exactly what their position was at the time they wrote that document (the same document can take on an entirely different meaning depending on whether it was written by the director of some government agency or other, or if it was scribbled down by an on-the-floor bureaucrat), and because it is useful to know where they ended up after this job. Especially in the Israeli sources the seemingly unimportant nobodies participating in low-level meetings have a nasty habit of ending up as chief-of-this or minister-of-that. It just looks like you know what you are doing if you are able to mention things like this…

Anyway, there are apparently some glitches in my googling. One of the more prominent members of the state department fraction that dealt with the Middle East during my allotted eleven years, was a gentleman named Phillips Talbot. Now, this one I do feel comfortable mentioning the name of because he is one of the good guys (and before you ask – no, I have no silly nickname for him). From the documents I’ve read I had formed an impression of a respectable, thoughtful, and intelligent man, one who was not afraid to stand up for what he believed was right and one who was also not afraid to introduce fresh ideas in the policy he worked to implement. However, he was also a realistic person, and I don’t think it would have occurred to me to describe him as an idealist from what I have seen from his pen. All in all a solid image, one that lead me to think I knew most of what there was need for me to know about him.

But then I googled him again today, hoping that I’d magically come across some useful information (or some clues as to where I could find such information) about a conference he hosted in 1964. I didn’t find that, but I did find something else. I had never looked at his birth date before, but when I peeked at the Wikipedia page about him I noticed that it said he was born in 1915. Strangely enough, though, it didn’t say when he died. I had never really thought about the possibility that any of the people I encounter in my research could be alive. After all, most of them were in their fifties or sixties already then, so the chances that they were alive now seemed unlikely.

But Phillips Talbot is.

I checked more websites, (I think I’ve been through almost eight pages of google hits on him today,) and the verdict is clear. This man that I assumed was no longer with us is alive and vibrant. He is turning 95 in only a few days, but he seems in no hurry to go anywhere. There were a few interviews with him on YouTube from last summer. He is an elderly – but I wouldn’t say old – man, who still gives me the distinct impression of being respectable, thoughtful and intelligent. The only big difference from the image I had formed about him is that he is still alive!

Now, this doesn’t really change anything. He is still just one of the many people that had an impact on the issues I write my thesis about. The fact that I also found his email address online doesn’t really matter either, because at this point in my research the complexity of adding an oral source and the can of worms that can be just seems too much to deal with. Had he been one of the Presidents or Secretaries of State I would have tried to contact him, but right now I don’t think I will.

Even if this discovery doesn’t change anything, it affects me slightly anyway… Now I know that this is a real, living person. It makes me wonder if I will read his documents differently, or if I will weigh my words more carefully when mentioning him. Even though I decided not to contact him, I can’t help but wonder if this will turn into one of those “what if’s”. What if I had emailed him? Would he have been able to enlighten me on certain things I had overseen or interpreted incorrectly? Further, the discovery that I had overlooked the fact that one of the people I spend every day with, so to speak, is still alive, makes me wonder what else I might have missed. Are there gaping holes in my research that I am blind to? Finally, the things I learned about Talbot’s work before and after he left the Near East division in State Department, while not changing my overall view of him, are already starting to affect the image I had formed. He used to be a journalist. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago. He was the US ambassador to Greece. And his main field of interest was not the Middle East, but rather India where he worked for years, one of them being 1947 when India gained its independence. One of the newspaper articles I read about him described him as a Gandhian.

Writing history is not necessarily about being neutral or objective anymore (here we go with the post modernism again), but nevertheless these remain ideals most historians at least try to approach. We try to be fair. We try to portray history if not “as it was” (courtesy of good ol’ Leopold von Ranke), at least as close to how we perceive how it was as possible. We may not admit it anymore, but we still seek to describe something true, something real. In this respect all this extra information I have gained today may be helpful, because it can help fill gaps in my research. On the other hand, it might be distractive, because Talbot’s (or anyone else’s) belief in Gandhian ideals is irrelevant to my interpretation of the documents that are supposed to be the evidence for my arguments in my thesis.

I thought I knew Mr. Talbot. It turned out there was one very big detail I had missed. Perhaps the best way to deal with this is to accept that I don’t know him, and to leave it at that?

On HPANA (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the web)

I’ve been holding back… Or, I haven’t deliberately, but there has been one thing I have neglected to tell you. I am a Harry Potter geek. There, I said it. If you want to know what the scar on Dumbledore’s knee looks like, I can tell you. The rules of quidditch? I’m your gal. Ask me how to de-gnome a garden, and I will give you a 20 minutes long lecture. Then again, many of the people reading this regularly wouldn’t be too impressed, because they are Harry Potter geeks as well. See, my internet network (internetwork?) begun with Harry Potter. But the story starts even further back. Prepare for the inside story...

It was the night before Christmas. Actually, it was probably not, even if my mother constantly complains she is late with preparations for the holidays. Anyway, she was out Christmas shopping and she did not know what to get me. This being my pre-workinginabookshop days, she decided to give me a book, which would always be a hit. That she landed on Harry Potter og de vises sten [and the Philospher's Stone] seems fairly coincidental.

I had only barely heard of Harry Potter before this, as it was right after its release in Norway which pegs it right before it became a major international success. It wasn’t even all that known in Britain yet (you know, according to JKR [Joanne Kathleen Rowling, duh!] standards. What I had heard about the book had not actually intrigued me all that much, so chances are I wouldn’t have picked it up had I not received it as a present (though, with the following attention circus I might have done so at a later time – even if I have managed to stay away from Twilight which is the only hype I can think of that is even remotely comparable). Since I had the book in my procession, however, I started reading it, and a whole new world opened up.

What drew me in at first wasn’t the magic or the orphan thing or even the boarding school (applications for which I’ve heard increased rapidly after the Potter-books became popular). No, it was the humour. Right from the start the Harry Potter books offer a comic twist that most likely is a big part of what has convinced millions of adults all over the world (as well as their children) to read the series of seven books. As I chuckled my way through those first few chapters, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

Once I had finished the first book, I craved for more. The problem was, it hadn’t been published yet. In Norwegian, that is. I was about 14, and I had learned English for three-four years. However, I was not yet at a stage where it came natural to me to speak it, or read it in large quantities. The books I had previously read in English were mostly those I already knew very well in their Norwegian translation, and many of these, even, were put away because I got tired of using the dictionary for every other word.

Having the carrot of getting to read the sequel to a book I loved, however, made all the difference. I quickly dropped the dictionary. What I couldn’t understand from context would have to wait – I understood enough to follow the story, and that was all that mattered. By the end of that book I could read English. I have read all the books in Norwegian translation as well, but always after having read the original (at least once) first, and always with a foul taste in my mouth (I have issues with the translator). Basically, reading the Harry Potter books opened up a whole new world of books to me.

I caught up with the British publication dates around book four (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or GoF as us geeks know it), my favourite in the series. I read it twice the day (and night) I got my hands on it, and I have read it at least six or seven times after that. After GoF, however, I was stuck in the same pain as other Potter fans around the globe – the endless waiting. It was years between the last few books in the series. Oh, the torture!

Until then it had not occurred to me to share my expectations for the books with anyone. Several of my friends had read them (one is almost as big a fan as I am. But not as big a geek), and we discussed the books occasionally, but we were teenagers. Most of our time was spent discussing boys (and none of them were named Harry). This is where the internet opened up another new world to me. I found several fansites online, and I think I joined a few as well to feed the addiction the Harry Potter books had become. However, I was not very active in any of them until I found The Harry Potter News Aggregator (HPANA).

I don’t know how I came across HPANA, really. According to my member stats I joined the day before the launch of The Half Blood Prince (HBP). At this point I had already read the strictly forbidden, highly protected, don’t-you-dare-to-sell-it-before-the-release-day book as a result of my bookstore employee benefits (*evil laugh*). I was dying to share, but didn’t (something I still credit myself with till this day). But I was ready to join the debates I knew would arise as soon as the rest of the world got to read it as well.

The thing is, when you discuss something you feel so passionate about with people who are passionate about the same thing, it is easy to make new friends. And it is easy to overcome differences such as age, background, religion or political beliefs. Through our mutual love for the Potterverse (oh, come on! The universe of Harry Potter, of course!) I got to “talk” (type, technically. But you know, this is 2010. It’s socially accepted to talk online now. Which you, as a blog reader, probably is aware of. But I am pretending to address this to a sceptical audience, so it would be great if you could flaunt some prejudices…) with people from all over the world. Some of them I gradually came to consider as great friends. Some of them I have met in person (six and counting) over the years, many of them I keep in touch with on a regular basis. When I was going to the US it was one of my old HPANA buddies who tipped me of someone in her neighbourhood who might be interested in a tenant (they were). While I was there I was able to visit two additional HPANA friends. For the past few years I have cooperated with many of them in my writers group. If and when I finally write a book it will be largely thanks to the connections and inspiration I have gained from my acquaintance with Harry Potter in general, and with HPANA in particular.

Assuming my mother had not bought me that present all those years ago, I might never have read these seven great books. I might never have bothered to learn English well enough to be able to use it on a daily basis. Had I not been able to do that, my choice of education (95% of my entire curriculum reading on the university has been in English) would have been difficult. If I had gone to the US at all, it would have been a completely different trip. And chances are I would not have continued to nourish my dream of writing books. I certainly would not be writing this, since I only ventured into the world of blogging because I was already familiar with online forums as means of communication and because several of my friends – HPANA friends – were already bloggers.

To say that Harry Potter has changed my life would be an understatement. Thus I think it is appropriate to express a great, big THANK YOU to both JKR and all her minions. HPANA-buddies – I love you all!

On tricks

I am tricksy. Sure, I am also dependable, nice, friendly, outgoing and pleasant. True, I can be annoying, overbearing, cruel, petty, lazy and disgusting. But most importantly for the purpose of this post, I am tricksy.


I play tricks, sometimes on others, but usually on myself. See, while I know I am dependable, I frequently ignore this because it is more comfortable to be lazy. While I favour being nice to people, I sometimes deliberately choose to be annoying or even cruel (why, how else could I justify being a “Cruella”?). However, whenever I go out of my way to indulge in my negative traits I simultaneously make an effort to hide it. I try to pretend I am not petty while I secretly take great satisfaction in the fact that others struggle too. But I won’t admit it (except I just did…). Likewise, I won’t admit that I have a weakness (apart from here on my public blog), and I won’t admit that I cheat or lie or fake (not that any of those things have ever happened. I give you my word!).

Many of my blog posts are written from my desk at the university. Ideally, nothing other than my skittish (I’m using this word because it fits on so many levels. The irony level. The “perhaps not the word a native speaker would choose, but interesting nevertheless” level. The “pronounce it with a Norwegian accent and it takes on an entirely different meaning” level) thesis should be written from this desk. Clearly, that is not the case. I’m willing to bet that 80% (at least) of the words produced here were never even intended to go into my thesis (blog posts and Facebook status updates included). Then about 80% of the words intended to go into my thesis are eventually edited away. This means that the percentage of the total words I write from this desk that actually go into my thesis is disturbingly small.

And yet I pretend to plod away every day. I’m not even sure I am fooling anyone, but pretending that I do makes me feel better all the same. Therefore, when I stare blankly at a random spot outside the window I try to look like I am pondering what caused the transition in US foreign policy towards the Middle East between 1956 and 1967. In reality, I am trying to decide whether I’d like to cut bangs again when I go to the hairdresser sometime soon. Until I have an answer to the very important question above (the bangs one, not the Middle East one) I spend hours watching my hair grow, pretending to solve important riddles that require footnotes.

One last confession before I call it a day. Lately I have pretended that I am too busy to blog. While it can be argued that I actually am, evidence suggests the opposite. The past two weeks I have spent an admirable number of blogable hours on Facebook; reading The Secret Garden for the 73927643th time; watching Glee (and some random sitcom that wasn’t even all that funny, but once I had started watching it was hard to look away); trying to remember books that I have read and subsequently plotting them into goodreads.com (thanks a lot for that distraction…); and having “serious” discussions with my friends in the cafeteria.

In short, I work my butt off to keep my good girl cover from blowing. I wonder how much I’d achieve if I put all that energy into actually being a good girl, as opposed to pretending? What an idea…

On ash*

We’re covered in ash. Isolated by it.


Norwegians had forgotten how it felt to be an outpost. Now we remember.

No more Tanzanian roses for Oslo. No more Norwegian salmon for Japan.

Are we at the risk of losing coffee, sugar, bananas, rice –things we have come to consider as crucial in our daily lives? Not to mention the decreased demand for oil that equals decreased prices and a giant income loss for oil-producing Norway.

We stood tall through the financial crisis. Will the ash be what pulls us down?

It is worth asking (ashing?) what a flight-free weekend in Europe meant in environmental terms. Perhaps we should take this opportunity to think of alternative means of transportation? Businesses and government agencies have been forced to host video conferences instead of flying in negotiators. If this is a possibility today, why can’t it also be something to consider when the ash disappears? Perhaps this was nature’s way of telling us to find new solutions? It will be interesting to see whether the pollution from the volcano was less than the pollution it prevented because of grounded planes.

In the end, though, the immediate feeling is inconvenience. There is nothing we can do. Turning off a volcano is harder than you’d think.

It is tempting to say with the Britons: “Damn you Iceland, we said cash, not ash!”



*The English word “ash” sounds suspiciously similar to the Norwegian “æsj”. Which can mean anything from “eugh” or “yuck” to “damn” or “shoot!”. At the moment I am not so concerned with the ash, but more with my own personal æsj. I have a cold which is keeping me from doing anything sensible. To top that, I am at home with two computers – one which cannot connect to the Internet, the other which refuses to connect with its own keyboard. I challenge you to figure out how I was able to post this…

On Chris Hughes, Adam Hills, and why you should know them both

If you don’t know who Chris Hughes is, don’t worry. It will be revealed. If you don’t know who Adam Hills is, however, you should worry, especially if you’re Australian. If you’re not Australian (like me, incidentally), it's not terribly strange if you don’t know who Adam Hills is, but it nevertheless is a shame. You see, Adam Hills is quite possibly the funniest man on the planet.


Yes I shamelessly love him and adore him, and I will soon reveal why, but first, let me tell you how we met.

Do you know my friend Ylva? No? She is also a very funny person (but not a man, so she is definitely not the funniest man on the planet), and I happen to know she occasionally reads my blog because she (like me, incidentally) is in the unfortunate self-inflicted hell of thesis-writing. Sort-of self-inflicted, seeing as we won’t get the jobs we want without an education. Not that we will get any jobs anyway…

When not using my blog for procrastination material, Ylva is a real champion on Facebook and YouTube. (She is also a real champion when it comes to thesis-writing, and motherhood, and friendship and stuff, but that is besides the point.) She occasionally shares the results of her talent for finding weird (often Australian, for some reason) YouTube videos on Facebook with me. Thus Ylva introduced me to Adam (remember him? I was about to tell you how we met? This was how we met…) Hills.

After having spent ridiculous amounts of time forcing myself not to blurt out in laughter in public because I was watching Adam Hills’ show “Joymonger and Characterful”on YouTube when I really should be working, I forgot how to end this long sentence. No, wait, here we go. After having watched “Joymonger and Characterful”, I realized that even though I had spent the entire time laughing (I might warn you – while most of it is ‘general funny’, some of it is ‘Australia funny’. You might not think that a Norwegian who has never visited Australia would be able to enjoy ‘Australia funny’ any better than you can [unless you are, of course, Australian yourself. In which case I assume you have ‘Australia funny’ in the roots {*snort* If you didn’t understand what was funny about that I am officially declaring myself as more ‘Australia savvy’ than you, regardless of the amount of time you may have spent there}]. Be aware, though, that this Norwegian has had hours of practice from watching “The Chaser’s War on Everything”. I even know my fair share of Aussie domestic politics because of the Chaser). Anyway – I should try to finish this sentence soon…

After having watched “J&C” I realized that even though I had spent the entire time laughing, it was a different kind of laughing. Because Adam Hills is never mean. It’s hard these days, isn’t it, to do comedy without being mean. Whenever I try to be funny, for instance, I cause terrible psychological damage to grammar and parentheses. It is unavoidable. Yet Adam (I almost feel we’re on a first-name basis by now) Hills (only almost) manage to be hilarious without his jokes mocking anyone, really, with the possible exception of himself. Because he does have an incredible sense of self-irony.

There is a lot of Adam Hills on YouTube, but once I had seen most of it I decided I wanted more. As it is pretty darned difficult to stalk people who are living on the other side of the planet, I was thrilled to find that Adam has a blog! I was even more thrilled to learn that during his current tour – appropriately named “Mess Around” – he would be posting summaries from each show on his blog.

I’ve read, I’ve laughed, and I’ve wished I could be there. In writing moment, Adam Hills (must try to get on first-name basis soon) is performing in Melbourne. While I don’t know a lot of people in Australia (notable exceptions include a couple of Harry Potteriacs, and then the guys from the Chaser, but I guess it is a stretch to say I know them…), I do know someone in Melbourne. I am currently trying to convince her to go see Adam (yay!), but she has so far been busy doing other things, like trying to get a job (nay!) Hello! Priorities!

I believe I have introduced Adam properly now, so let’s move on to Chris. Chris Hughes was the (un)fortunate audience member of one of Adam’s early shows in Melbourne who was picked by the comedian to become famous. More famous than Shiloh Jolie Pitt (one of the many childlings of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, otherwise known as Brangelina), who is famous for being famous and thus not actually all that interesting.

Chris Hughes, on the other hand, will be famous for stripping on Federation Square (in Melbourne, I can only assume) if Adam Hills manages to raise at least 20 000 Australian dollars by the end of the ongoing 2010 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Even though the cause of getting someone to embrace their nudity is good on its own (or what do you say, Tami?), Chris Hughes only agreed to do this if the money raised will go to the Simon Rhoden Foundation which is aiding people with cystic fribrosis.

Once I had read the blog, I immediately found the Official Chris Hughes Fanclub on Facebook and joined. I don’t have any particular interest in making Chris Hughes famous. I do think the Simon Rhoden Foundation sounds like a worthy cause. I am slightly infatuated with Adam Hills (even if we’re back on using his full name…).

But in reality there is another reason why I support this project. I love the kind of dugnadsånd (I have explained the meaning of this on a previous occasion) it creates. People are coming together to work for the greater good, whether they believe this greater good as raising money for a charity, making a man strip or deranking Shiloh as a celebrity. In a way, Adam Hills’ effort (and method of choice) to make Chris Hughes famous is the power of the internet materialized (and in a strange way it reminds me of the enthusiasm displayed on http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/ – way to sneak a giraffe into this post as well, Cruella!). Because of the internet, a girl is right now sitting in the rather uninteresting city/town of Kongsvinger in Norway, doing her best to pull the few strings available to her to promote an Australian comedian’s latest stunt.

This poster was made, in true dugnadsånd, by other audience members from one of Adam Hills’ shows. It can be downloaded from his blog, and Adam Hills strongly encourages YOU to do so, print it out and hang it up wherever you may be. If you then take a picture of it (I will!) and send it to Adam (Hills), he might mention it on his blog (or even in one of his shows - who knows [accidental rhyme])!



So, whether you are a regular reader or a random stopper-by (I ought to get a few of those seeing as I have the randomest collection of googlable search words assembled in this post – many of my first-time visitors come from some very weird google searches indeed…), I strongly encourage you to visit and join the Chris Hughes Fanclub on Facebook; to seek out Adam Hills on YouTube (or if you’re lucky enough to be in Australia – check his blog for tour dates); and to print out the Chris Hughes poster and hang it up somewhere.

Finally, in the spirit of the dugnad, I’d like to try to start another quest. As mentioned, I currently have another friend (mutual friend of Ylva and me, actually) staying in Melbourne. This is, also as mentioned, where Adam is performing shows, right now! While the quest to make Chris Hughes famouser (alright, more famous) than Shiloh Jolie Pitt is certainly an extremely worthy cause, I also think that making Ida going to a show with Adam Hills (or possibly the Chris Hughes strip night) is almost as good a cause. I don’t know if Ida is reading my blog (I might persuade her to do so), but I’d nevertheless like to appeal to her through the blogging community: Ida! Make sure to show up to be my extended link to Adam (first name!)!

On job applications

Dear future employer (because there really is no doubt you will hire me after I have made you aware of the following),


I can proudly announce that I am applying for a position in your company. I do realize that you have not announced any openings, but I have no worries that you will rethink this once I enlighten you on the unique and extremely useful competence I possess.

It is a fact that most jobs consist of doing one thing, and one thing alone: What most jobs is all about (unless you are a male lingerie photographer or a female chocolate tester) is doing endless amounts of things you do not want to do. Now, if there is anything six years at the university have trained me for, it is doing things I do not want to do.

I do not find it particularly rewarding going through endless amounts of pointless sources for my pointless master thesis. The few glimpses of unpointlessness are too rare and too short to give much if any satisfaction. I also do not find it rewarding to spend time writing nonsense in an attempt to make sense out of all the pointlessness. I do, occasionally, find it slightly rewarding to post random status updates to Facebook, but I realize this only in a very limited way can be said to be linked to my studies.

And yet I force myself to stray off Facebook every now and then.

I have spent hours after hours on leafing through documents by people whose names I cannot keep apart (mostly Johnson or Johnston). These people were sending each other letters and telegrams and airgrams and memos (they must have had poor email access in the 1950s) about more or less significant topics, topics that occasionally are related to the topic of my thesis. I have spent even more time trying to make sense of these documents, and to write about them. I have even spent time trying to make the text I write seem relevant and plausible and professional. Definitely not something I like to do (I am more of a parentheses and italics kind of gal, after all).

Therefore you should, without hesitation, hire me immediately. Preferably for a well-paid job. Let us be honest – I will not glow with enthusiasm for the work I perform in your company. But I will do it nonetheless. Because this is the most important lesson I have learned from my expensive education: Life is all about doing things you do not feel like doing. So if you do not feel like hiring me after this inspirational note, that actually implies all the more that you should.

Best regards,

Your future (reluctant) employee

On æøå

It is Friday (I bet you all knew that, but it’s a neat way to introduce what I’m about to say, you see. Also, it’s a neat way for those of you who perhaps didn’t know it was Friday to find out. Plus, there might be readers in the future [I said might. Unrealistic, perhaps, but there might be…] who are not reading this on a Friday, and for them it would surely be useful to know this was supposed to be read on a Friday. I think. I’m not entirely sure why that would be so useful, but you never know what comes in handy. So I’m including this particular piece of information mostly the convenience of any potential future readers who for some reason are backtracking my blog and for some other reason [probably] needs to know what day this was posted [because, in all fairness, it is not written on a Friday. It’s written on a Thursday. Delusional Thursday, obviously] [have I closed all brackets then? No? No.]) [There.]


It is Friday. And on Fridays, everyone should make a point of laughing. This is my philosophy (well, no, it isn’t really. If I do have a philosophy regarding laughing – and I am not at all sure I do – it should be more in the lines of “everyone should be laughing every day”, but for the sake of the argument I’ll stick to the Friday-laugh-philosophy. In all fairness, Friday is a day too, so it’s not a contradictory philosophy. It’s not Descartes and Rousseau. Anyway…). Seeing as everyone should make a point of laughing on Fridays, it also follows that we all should make a point of making others laugh. Spread the laugh, so to speak. So, it is my goal to make you laugh with this post (are you laughing yet? No? Oh, come on… It doesn’t matter if you have to force it – that’ll count! Ha? Ha ha? Hahaha? Still nothing? Right, I’ll keep on trying then…).

The thing is, I don’t really have an idea where to start trying to make you laugh. I don’t have anything particularly funny to blog about, seeing as there has been very little “funny” on my schedule lately. I spent great parts of today (yesterday, when you’re reading this. No, I’m not deliberately trying to confuse you…) talking to my supervisor about my thesis, and we all know (at least I assume you know this, but then again I have a nasty tendency to think people can read my mind and thus understand how I feel. Not often happening [fortunately, I suppose], but in this case I think it is safe to say that if you have read my blog with some regularity, you should know…) how little humour there is to be found in my thesis and the work surrounding it (yes, I know the phrase “work surrounding my thesis” is awkward, but I am too tired to straighten it out. After all, this is no thesis).

Where was I? Oh, yes. Non-funny day. And while I sometimes feel that non-funniness can be converted to funniness by employing a great big dash of irony, I don’t really feel like doing that now. I might be too sleepy, or the subject (my thesis, in case you fell off in between all the digressions) might be too touchy. Either way, no ironizing (oh, why, of all nights, isn’t this a word? Ironizing should totally be a word! But the only option offered by my spell check alternative thingie is ionizing, which isn’t the same thing at all!) (UPDATE! Ironize is indeed a word according to the Free Online Dictionary, which means that the stupid Word dictionary has failed AGAIN [or it means I am putting too much emphasis on an online dictionary]. Ha! Take that! [not the band. Did they reunite, or was that only a rumour? And what about Robbie Williams?]) – no ironizing tonight (or today, Friday. Maintain the illusion).

So, funny is off the list. Only I wanted to be funny. So what I am left with is this little Facebook incident that happened while I was impatiently waiting for the cake I am baking (long story – all right – let’s face it, I’m in a long story kind of mood... I am baking because I promised to bring a cake to a book circle meeting/radio program broadcast survey thing I am going to tomorrow. It was supposed to be last week [well, actually, it was supposed to be two weeks ago], but due to any number of unfortunate events, it got cancelled, twice. So, tomorrow we are on, and I promised to bring a carrot [well, no, cake] since I have largely been the one holding the stick, trying to make people commit. I meant to bake the cake earlier today, but for some reason we didn’t have sugar, and this is not the kind of neighbourhood where you borrow a cup of sugar [plus, there is a convenience store about 100 meters down the road]. So I had to go out and buy sugar. Which I did. Eventually. But it got a lot later than I planned, not that it is terribly late [22:30/10:30 pm], but I am terribly tired. So I should go to bed. Which I can do, now that the cake is done. But then I started writing this. Wow. Now I digress within my digressions. Even I get confused then! Anyway [#2]).

While I was waiting for the cake in the oven, I decided to try to figure out on my very own how some people are able to post stars (★) on Facebook. I tried a couple likely options, but no matter what I did, the only thing I accomplished was to spam the newsfeed of my friends (sorry if any of you are reading). Instead, I asked for help. And help I got.

Mark handily provided me with a link to a useful blog with lots and lots of funny, useless Facebook thingies. Which I tried. All of them. Or at least almost all of them.

The stars and ♫ and ♣♣ and ♦♦ and ♠ all worked perfectly, but there were also something you could do to make sparkly things (notice how the ratio of words like “things” and “thingies” increase dramatically as I grow more tired) appear on your screen. I could not make this work, but apparently I must have done something. Because my Facebook (both profiles too) now think my keyboard is an English-speaking one, instead of the Norwegian-speaking one I do have. Which means that I can no longer use the letters æøå on Facebook (bet you were wondering what the hing today’s blog post title had to do with anything). It also means that a lot of symbols have a different location than what I am used to. ) is (, for instance. Æ is ‘. Ø is ; and å is [.

Refreshing the page did not help.

Logging in and out did not help.

I pictured a future where I would have to convert completely to English, seeing as I would no longer be able to express myself properly in Norwegian on Facebook. Yes, I spend too much time on Facebook.

Fortunately, what did help was either to bake a cake; to write an overly long, complicated and silly blog post; or to fall slightly asleep over the keyboard. I may never know which of these that actually did the trick, but Facebook has forgiven me now. I can once again write Norwegian there (sleepy yay).

So, to conclude, seeing as it is Friday, I think you should do your very best to laugh. If this post did not make you laugh, my feelings aren’t hurt (if anything, I am dead impressed you are still reading, seeing as most people would have fallen off waaaaay up at the first paragraph), but I will strongly encourage you to find something else to laugh about. My stupidity at the keyboard might not have done the trick (but who am I to judge – this might simply be because you have so much compassion that you couldn’t bring yourself to laugh at my misery). My parentheses and brackets might not have done it either (that sounded sort of naughty. I didn’t intend it to, I swear!). My cake might – but chances are you won’t be eating my cake (unless you show up at my friends Merethe and Anne-Lene’s place at 19:30/7:30 pm tomorrow [today – it’s Friday, remember!]). So to make absolutely sure you have a good laugh today, I once again recommend that you force it. Start off with a single “ha”. Keep repeating your “ha’s” with increasing speed. “Ha ha.” “Ha-ha-ha.” “Hahahahahahahahaha.” I promise, if you keep this activity up for more than a minute, you will actually be laughing!

Have a nice weekend! ☺



Good Giraffe! Now Blogger is doing it to me too?!? I suppose that isn’t such a big deal seeing as I always write my blog posts in Word and then copy&paste, but I am NOT happy with Blogger pulling a Facebook on me, pretending that my keyboard isn’t Norwegian! Bah! Bah-ha! Hahahaha! Habahabababababahahahahabahabahbaha! (It isn’t actually helping when you only type it…)

On research

48 Address by President Eisenhower, 20 February 1957, published in Department of State Bulletin, 11 March 1957.


The above is an actual footnote from my actual thesis. For your enjoyment (and mine – you have no idea how funny I think it is to have a footnote at the top of a page. MAN this thesis writing is messing with my head!).

I promise I won’t start using footnotes in my blog, though. Not because I don’t enjoy footnotes (as proved by the above), but because I recognize that there are different kinds of research and documentation required for different kinds of writing. When writing blog posts, for instance, I usually settle for whatever I can find via Google and/or Wikipedia. I am aware that there are issues regarding the use of online sources, but after years of training I usually find it relatively easy to distinguish the serious stuff from what is obviously fabricated. Besides, my blog posts very rarely require heavy research.

When writing fiction, I tend to take my research more seriously. I spend more time on it, I check several sources to make sure my information is accurate and I try to fit the fictional details in with the factual ones to make sure it flows without losing context.

Finally, the most intense way of research for me is what I do academically. Working with my thesis has taught me a lot about how to (and how not to) research. I’ve spent time in an archive, photographing and classifying original documents that I have later read and reread and then reread again. I’ve looked at monographs, biographies, and anthologies. I’ve been through thousands of pages of secondary sources, where renowned historians (and some not so renowned – that’s part of the process too) have considered the same or similar sources as me, and drawn their conclusions that may or may not differ with mine.

It would never occur to me to use Wikipedia in research for my thesis. Even though I know that a lot of the material on Wikipedia is serious and useful, the potential for errors is too big in a medium consisting of whatever its users put into it. Besides, it simply would not look good in my bibliography (which, naturally, is of crucial importance). Finally, when you are writing about sensitive topics such as the Middle East conflict, the potential traps by not being critical towards your sources are endless. Today I am capable of recognizing bias in texts on the Middle East (often based on something as simple as the choice of words), but two years ago I wouldn’t have been. In a medium like Wikipedia it would almost be unnatural if the articles about the Middle East weren’t biased.

Likewise, it would not occur to me to consult an archive before writing a blog post. It would not make sense to spend that much time and money (I travelled across an ocean, you know) on a blog and the format of the blog does not require it. In fact, I think it would probably be detrimental for the purpose of most blogs to spend too much time on research (depending on the topic of the blog, naturally).

Each kind of writing requires its own type of research, and it is important to find what fits your kind of writing. At least, that is my (hard-earned, I might add) experience.







Good giraffe – I just wrote a writing blog! Giraffes must be flying!

On self-incrimination

Every now and then, you should google yourself.









(I took a break there, just to make sure you did.)



Find anything interesting? 



I’m not a pathological self-googler, but I have done so with some irregularity over the past decade or so (have we had google for a decade yet? Was I really enlightened enough to think of the possibility of googling myself at the age of 14? [I was about to write “or that self-absorbed”, but then I read the number 14. Everyone is self-absorbed at 14… Not to pretend I’m not still self-absorbed. Is self-absorbed even a word?] And even if I was enlightened/self-absorbed enough, if google existed and if all other necessary conditions applied, would there have been much of a point?)

The answer to the final question firmly tucked into the parenthesis, is no. If you googled me ten years ago (still assuming google existed), you wouldn’t have found squant (for my pride’s sake, let me assure you that I know what “squant” is. Why? Because I googled it [*pride crumbles*]. You should too – it’s pretty entertaining. I can take another break if you want).

The reason you wouldn’t have found squant when googling me ten years ago (apart from the two obvious ones – a) squant hadn’t even been discovered; and b) you probably didn’t know me, so you had no idea I was googlable. To you, I was owiueuowihgew  – I really must try to limit my parentheses, they are becoming very difficult to follow… It’s got to do with my lack of opportunity to use them in my daily writing, methinks… I’ll just start the sentence over for this one, though…)

The primary reason you wouldn’t have found squant when googling me ten years ago is that I hadn’t done squant. I was 14, I had barely an idea that there was a world out there! Fortunately, I have come a little way since then.

A few years ago, when googling me, you’d find a few references to some school work, most notably a project submitted to a competition I participated in. I didn’t win, but my group’s work was displayed online nevertheless. A fairly decent online exposure.

With time, more hits appeared. My Facebook page is there (though it’s a closed profile, so no peek-a-peeking). A few references to stuff I’ve done at the university. Another project I participated in, this time a more serious one with actual employers. Definitely one I am proud to have attached to my name online. Last summer a new hit appeared, possibly the most prestigious-looking one. It’s there, out in the cybersphere, that I’ve been a lecturer at the University of Oslo. Granted, if you actually click on the link, it will reveal that it is for one day only, but perhaps people won’t be bothered to click?

There are also a few non-“professional” hits that I, nevertheless, am quite proud of. Most notably is the link to the Burrow – my notorious writers group – which in these days is hosting a February/Valentine’s feature without me. I am VERY sad to not being able to participate (stupid stupid stupid thesis), but I am also VERY impressed at the amount of work the few of them that were able to participate put down. The result can be found, as usual, at http://www.the-burrow.org/, and I highly recommend everyone to stop by. Whether you prefer sappy, sexy, sarcastic, sadistic, sensual, sympathetic, (in)sane or sweet drabbles, you’ll find it there.

The link between the Burrow and my name, however, isn’t entirely unproblematic to me, personally. It took a long time for me to be comfortable with telling people that I like to write. (Oops, I just told YOU, didn’t I..?) Having a blog, I guess, pretty much lets that particular cat out of the bag, but, as you may have noticed, I don’t write under my real name. Granted, my pseudonym is one that has been sticking with me for a long time, so a lot of people know the true identity of Cruella Collett. But there is a much larger quantity of people in my life who has never even heard of this Cruella-person (they only know the black-and-white puppy killer. I swear we’re not related). I don’t go out of my way to keep my two identities separate, but I don’t actively try to reunite them either.

Which brings me to the final point of my self-googling adventure (you were expecting that all my digressions had made me forget my conclusion altogether, hadn’t you? Well, that is the difference between a regular digressionist and me, the digressionista…). When I, for no reason at all, typed my own name (not my pseudonym) into google, the VERY first hit that came up was my blog.

Huh.

That’s weird, I thought. How and why is my (actual) name linked to my fake-name written blog?

Then I started to consider the implications. It has become more and more common for people to google each other. Now, anyone who knows my name can find my blog. That is a little scary, to be frank, and it certainly makes me want to consider what it is I am posting here. Not that I am overly controversial, but you know. No more scandalous slandering of identifiable people…

Secondly, it is also very common for employers to google their potential employees. Very soon (or not so soon, depending on whether I manage to finish my thesis on time) I will be in the position of seeking employment. Is there anything in my blog making me less attractive for a potential employer? Perhaps they don’t hire people who make the Tower Bridge in gingerbread?

Ultimately, I don’t really think my blogging will be a problem, professionally or personally. But it did annoy me a little bit that, without my knowledge or approval, my two personas had been interlinked. So I did some research.

And what did I find?

The culprit is to be found right here. Me! I did it. I incriminated myself. I posted my actual name on my blog! Why would I do that? Now it will forever (or until google is eradicated by an electromagnetic pulse in 2012) be linked with my blogginess (blog meeting silliness equals blogginess). Was this the result of some unconscious desire to end the schism that have been hindering the “professional” me from bonding with the “creative” me? This isn’t really a plausible theory, however, since the “professional” me isn’t all that professional. Actually, the “professional” me is fairly creative in its unprofessionalism. Right. Such a good idea to tell potential employers googling me that I am unprofessional…

Oh, well. It’s out there now. Mari, meet Cruella. You were separated at birth, but now you are from now on going to live together like twins. The conjoined kind.