A Roll in the Universe

I am feeling restless and have the urge to do something. I can't, however, seem to wrap my head around the weather astrology, that is, I can't seem to find the focus for it. And so, my goal of trying to make a weather forecast for the autumn in Bergen using astrology, is put on the back burner. I wonder sometimes if I should keep doing astrology. Well, that's another matter. Right now, the matter is the book I have inside of me. I attended the Raptus festival last weekend, Norway's comics convention, and observed that a lot of artists are actually drawing themselves. One artist's thick, short eyebrows show up in all his male characters. Another artist does large, round eyes, which he has. Yet another lends his thick, short hair to his characters, and a slight woman with small features and huge eyes is mirrored in her main female character. Which all made me think of writers. It is said that every writer's first novel is actually an autobiography. Wr...

Some time in high school: A friend: "Let Jesus be in the driver's seat." Me: "Naw, I'll drive. Jesus can be the navigator." Jesus never did get to ride shotgun with me, but finally God did get to chauffeur. This past weekend. My department of nine people is made of six men with outdoors interests and three women without. The annual social in our department therefore usually consists of hiking or fishing. This year's trip was no different. We were headed for Aurlandsdalen , a canyon carved by the Aurland river, starting at a mountain lodge called Østerbø Fjellstove and ending at the bottom in the village of Vassbygdi. I'm not used to hiking and so was nervous about the trip. However, one of my female co-workers, G, is deaf, and she was determined to go. She bought herself new hiking boots, walking poles (her sense of balance is destroyed by her hearing loss), rucksack, Thermos and I guess some other gear. We discussed back and forth how to do...

"May you live in interesting times" say the Chinese – and mean it as a curse. If things are constantly changing around you, there is no peace. As usual, my own little life is not interesting. (More about that farther down.) But the news is currently full of all kinds reports about lives elsewhere being far too interesting. Terrorists killing school children in Chechnya, one hurricane after another pummeling the Caribbean, Florida and soon the Mexican Gulf, odd-ball accidents (traffic and otherwise) and tragic murders (like the report in Sweden of a 16 year old stabbing a 14 year old). And of all things, a mosquito problem in Arizona (arid Arizona!), spreading the West Nile virus (the mosquitos breed in neglected swimming pools). I'm sure I've missed something, but that'll do. It's enough interesting times. Why did I say "as usual" about my "uninteresting" life? Well, when I was a kid, I was in the Brownies and my grandma was driving s...

In my last blog , I participated in a meme. I followed the link (Minding the Planet) to discover that this particular meme is now "closed" and another one has started in its place. Did I want to participate in this next incarnation as well? That's when it hit me: This is just like chain letters! In my childhood, I would get a carefully copied, handwritten letter usually stating that this chain had started in 1959 in some other country, so please don't break it! After one attempt at doing my part and deciding it wasn't worth the bother, I have since taken great pride in breaking chains. So no more memes for me. Not that the idea is invalid or that watching ideas catch on and spread is uninteresting; I just was never any good at following the crowd.

Thusly: This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below). The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) – results and commentary will appear there in the future. Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogs...

Ran into the cousin of a friend today – A.B. Last fall she started to train to be a home nurse's aid, a two-year education. She dropped out after one semester, she told me. She had second thoughts about her choice of future. I met A.B. several years ago when she was bartending at a night club in town. My friend introduced us. A.B. no longer wants to work at waitressing or bartending, and decided to try the line of work my friend got into: In-house nurse's aid (meaning people who go to people's homes to assist them with bathing, diapering, medicating, feeding, etc. My Grandma received such services for a few years). Such nurse's aids also work in nursing homes. But that last was not for A.B. She said she didn't want to work some place where co-workers don't even greet you when you arrive for work. I totally agreed with her that that wasn't a desirable work situation. Now A.B. was trying to figure out what to do next. She did enjoy going to people's ho...

This summer has been a bit odd for me. I feel like I've been in limbo, but after transitting Saturn (astrology's wet blanket) moved away from it's conjunction to my natal Mars (astrology's Dennis the Menace), some of that feeling of limbo lifted. One effect is that I now feel like blogging. It's not like I haven't experienced anything worth blogging about this summer. Or that I haven't had a reason to be in limbo besides the astrological one. So what follows is my version of "What I Did This Summer": Tradition One tradition in Norway is to celebrate Midsummer's Eve (June 23), also called St. John's Eve (Christianity's version of a merger). One especially traditional way to celebrate said eve is by attending the Laksevåg bonfire. Laksevåg is a municipality across the harbor from downtown Bergen and was incorporated into Bergen in 1972. It is the venue for Norway's largest barrel bonfire and this year was its 101st anniversary. ...