A Roll in the Universe

I can now compare the opera "Madama Butterfly" to the movie "Pulp Fiction": Both were to take about 3 hours to get through, and in both cases I gave up after the first hour. I've told people I'm not into opera or musicals. I don't like my concerts interrrupted by story telling, and I don't like my stories interrupted by singing. However, my season ticket included "Madama Butterfly", which I've only heard about, so off I went to row 15, seat 34. It didn't take many minutes before I realized the drawback to singing a story. In Italian. To a Norwegian audience. Fortunately, high above the stage, was an an LED screen giving Norwegian translations of the libretto. Look at what's going on on the stage, or look up at the LED captions to find out what they're singing so you can understand what's going on on the stage. Tough choice. I tried to find a way to get into the story or the stage or the music, but wasn't getti...

You can go find your copy of James Brown belting out "I feel good" if you want. My version is more low-key and without the groovy dance moves, but I do feel good. I like to thank ho'oponopono for that. So I'm going to talk about it again. I broke my own heart this past December. I visited my mother in Nevada and we had no fights, no snark, no desire to avoid each other. Decades of being dysfunctional were over. At one point, we sat at her dining room table, talking about my screwed up great-grandmother who managed to ruin three generations of daughters. Mom and I were now talking about how each of us had found a path that led us to healing and forgiveness, and that we now, finally, were the first mother-daughter pair that got along and had no issues. And it suddenly hit me that that is exactly what we had done: We reversed the habits of a dysfunctional family legacy. We grabbed each other's hand and said triumphantly, "We made it!" The love that had alw...

Corroding metal siding

Here's a follow-up to my last two posts: The Indians visiting here noted that Norwegians didn't stay long at the office, leaving to go home to dinner with their families, and that on the weekends, the whole family did things together. The right-wing government insists that Norway wants shopping malls to be open on Sundays. We don't. That's one big reason why the left won so many counties and cities. Because parliament said they'd leave the decision up to the counties and cities. Heh. Sundays in Norway: Fewer buses, fewer cars, fewer people. The only thing open is restaurants, the gas station, the movie theater and some museums and souvenir shops. You can't buy clothes or shoes or rugs or hair-cuts or massages or electric tea kettles on Sundays. Instead, you stay in and watch Tour de France or some other sport—or, as the Indians noted, you and your whole family take a Sunday walk or hike. Some people will even go to church! The stores are op...

Youngstorget, Oslo When I first moved to Norway in 1969, politics here were so left-leaning that they were approaching extremism. Yesterday, in local elections, the Norwegian Labor party (Arbeiderpartiet) once again became Norway's most powerful party, and had its biggest win in Bergen since 1967. A fact that makes me happy now, but which was my bane as a child. So what's changed? The anti-US sentiments of the 1960's and early 1970's that permeated a lot of Europe (partly due to the Vietnam war) eased by the 1980's. The anti-American sentiments I heard as a child, were virtually gone when I came back to Norway in 1981. Since then, Arbeiderpartiet's close ties to Norway's largest union, LO, have loosened, making the party more accessible to those who don't like LO. More importantly, I've changed. I'm going against Winston Churchill's advice: “If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative...

As an American, I sometimes get asked what I think about some happening in the US that has made the news in Norway. What it is about Americans and guns? Or all the whining about increased gas prices? These questions are fairly general and therefore comfortable. Being questioned and criticized as if I was directly responsible for whatever unpopular man got into the White House, was and is not comfortable. Currently, we are in a project at work that involves an Indian company, and so I have spent two weeks listening to the lilt of Indian accents and English spoken with rolled R's and thick L's and have another week to go. At the same time, the news from India reports two sisters have been sentenced to be raped by a local, unofficial village council because of something their brother did; the sisters are from a rural town outside Delhi.* I have chosen not to bring this up. As friendly as we are with each other, I know from personal experience that what gets into the interna...

So I got my own domain something like four years ago, and the stuff I have here is still in limbo. It's like moving house: Taking everything I have in the old home, and trying to make it fit and function in the new one. Some things look fine, some don't fit, some have no purpose in the new place. And some things end up in new configurations that bring new joy and discovery. I'm hoping very much for that last. I have this website/blog*, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and now Flickr (because I discovered I'd better have an extra back-up of my photos). In trying to post something everywhere, I'm feeling scattered. I like short tweets. I like instantly posting a photo. But I also like having complete control over my own stuff and waxing on about it, offering far more than 140 characters at a time and why not a handful photos, too? The one thing that bugs me the most is Facebook. It's like a bar that you hate, but all your friends love it so that's where you...