Heyooo
I just realized that it is not always easy being a Norwegian in an English mans
world. For instance, one of the great vices of Norwegian people with half a grasp of our beautiful language is the dividation of words. Oh the hilarity which arises when people split a word that wasn’t meant to be split.
Why am I rambling about this? Well, brussels sprouts is the correct way to write it, as confirmed by THE ALMIGHTY WIKIPEDIA, HAIL! Alas, my silly Norwegian head twitches and wants it to be written brusselsprouts.
Now, I bet you’re thinking, why is this guy talking about brussels sprouts? Well, in about 10 hours, my plane leaves for Brussels. Oh glorious EU-capital and home of countless bureaocrats. I am leaving, ooon a jetplaaane tralala. Well, my brotha lives there, so I’ma go visit him yo.
These aint no brussels sprouts.
That’s it for this time.
It’s late, I have a meeting early in the morning, and I’m waiting for this damn printer to speed the hell up so I can get my vandalism overwith and walk home, which takes at least 90 minutes, and get a few hours of sleep. I have a feeling there will be a lot of caffeine in tomorrow’s diet. Luckily, I have Kindle for PC running on wine on my Linux-powered netbook, Kindle for Android on my delicious smartphone, enough juice to last me till tomorrow night, and I have discovered a delicious book series!
Now, you should know that I haven’t read fiction in at least three years, so my taste has probably dulled since my heyday, back when I was making good progress through Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Those who have attempted to make it through that dreadful journey will know that the endeavor is enough to deter anyone from ever picking up a book again. But that is another blog post entirely, this one is about Rachel Caine’s series: The Morganville Vampires.
Please ignore the godawful pun.
I could make this very, very short, and tell you that this book is like the Twilight series, and that would be all. Luckily, I would be lying, at least a little. At a distance, this series will indeed sound exactly like Twilight, it features an uncertain girl, Claire, of 16 years who moves to a new town, Morganville, Texas, where there be Vampires. Teen crushes ensue, etcetera etcetera.
What makes this series enjoyable for me is that, while not as rich as the lore in Anne Rice’s works, there is enough depth in the history of this uncharming little town to keep me interested, and wanting to learn more. The beginning of the first book is a little annoying exactly because it misses this, the protagonist has to discover what’s wrong with the town before you as the reader can start learning about it. Luckily, this part of the book passes before you grow tired and put the book away, and by the time you’ve started to have your fill of Morganville (heh heh), you realize that you actually want to know what happens to the wretched little girl. It’s really quite clever, the girl gets you interested in the town, which keeps you distracted while it gets you interested in the girl. And yes, there’s a love story in there, but it never quite takes the top priority, which is nice, because really, if you wanted a bad romance novel, you should just pick up Twilight anyway.
Pictured: The goddamn Truth!
So, that was mostly the good so far. The bad? Like I already mentioned, this isn’t an Anne Rice masterpiece, this is pretty light reading, Rachel Caine loves to throw in a deus ex machina or two, and sometimes you distinctly get the feeling that a paragraph or sentence has been jammed in after the rest had already been written, in order to close up a gaping plot hole, like for instance why Claire isn’t just using the cell in her pocket. Another point of mild annoyance is that a few of the major characters are left largely unexplored until the third book, which leaves you wondering why you should care what happens about them, and the minor characters are so psychologically thin they wouldn’t be able stand up to a warm summer breeze (I’m looking at you, Monica…)
All in all though, at least halfway into book 4, the good outweighs the bad, and I enjoy reading again, and this was the series that brought an end to the dark times, for which I will for ever, or at least a long time, be grateful!
You… You’re still here? Oh, you want a rating, don’t you? Everyone expects a rating once they realize that they’re reading a review. Hmm, alright, on a scale from 1 to 11, I’m giving it a sheep.
Song of the Blog: The Birth And Death Of The Day, by Explosions In The Sky.
Toodles,
Bjørn
This is the second post in two days written by me. Why? Because I am supposed to be writing a paper on not being born a woman and another on linguistics, and read two Raymond Chandler-novels. And as you may know by know: I am the queen of procrastination.
Right now I’m in the library with a friend, and I must say: I love Tromsø! This is the best library I’ve ever been in, and the view is amazing. But do you know what isn’t amazing? Writing essays.
I wish I could write this paper in a more humoristic way. Seeing as it is a paper on philosophy, and I am supposed to show my own opinions and views in the writing of it, I guess I could write it like that, but it is supposed to be in preparation for my exam, and I most certainly can’t do that when writing my exam, so I guess I should just get used to it right away.
My last post did actually get comments, so I guess I should write about radical faminism more often. So now I will write about it some more.
The Simone de Beauvoir quote that I ended last blog-post with is the quote I am writing an essay on. And it is found in her most famous book: The Second Sex. This is actually two books, published as one, with many parts and chapter. It’s huge!
I haven’t read all of it yet, and maybe I never will, but I am reading the chapters on gender vs. sex, and how girls are treated differently than boys, this resulting in the different qualities that are associated with the different genders. It is an evil circle of girls being made submissive by the society, and therefore the society continues to expect girls to be submissive.
I was never brought up to be like that. My mother, being the strong and wonderful woman that she is, thought me to stand up for what I believe in, and she allowed me to dress in the way I wanted to and play with the toys I liked. There was no question of forcing me to wear dresses and pink, I got Legos and toy-cars when that was what I wanted, and I climbed trees and had playfights without anyone telling me that it wasn’t “suitable for a girl”. For this I am thankfull.
This doesn’t seem like a very radical up-bringing, I am sure, but I am also sure that my mother and fathers liberal gender-views were important for me to become the woman I have become. No-one ever told me I couldn’t do something just because of my sex, and so I never believed it to be impossible for me to do anything. And yet many girls and women react to my way of being, and even become biased towards me because of it. Do I view myself as any less of a woman for it? No. I know that I’m a woman, I even want to be a mother someday, I just don’t believe that women are naturally more “soft and fuzzy” than what men are. Men are just as capable of love, wimsiness and care-giving as women, and women are just as capable of entrepeneurship, intelligence and sexuality as men. And yet these qualities are still by many linked to one gender alone.
I say to hell with genders, we are all humans. The only thing different between women and men are reproductive organs, hormone-levels and muscle strength. Doesn’t seem quite as important as the human qualities of feelings, intelligence and sexuality, does it?
-Frida
There are two significant causes leading to me writing this particular entry on this particular evening:
1) In less then two weeks it will be the 8th of March, also known as the International [Working] Women’s Day.
2) I am currently writing my first essay in Feminist Philosophy.
The past years I have been active in the planning and celebration of the International Women’s Day in Bodø, so it felt natural for me to be active in the group planning the celebration “Ladyfest” in Tromsø. (That’s right: Tromsø have enough people to actually have an entire festival… In Bodø we had a march for women’s rights and hardly anything else…) I’m glad that I joined the group to plan it, especially because the other women in the group are incredibly nice and supportive.
So, why do we demonstrate for women’s rights? A lot of people ask me about it, and especially in Norway where women are supposedly equal to men. And yet they make lower wages, work more part-time, are the victims of nearly all sexual assaults, have higher rates of eating disorders, and the list goes on. These are some of the reasons why I feel it’s important to keep working for women’s rights, and what’s more: It isn’t all about the norwegian women. It’s called the International Women’s Day.
Let’s face it: This is a man’s world. The dictators in Egypt, Libya and the rest of the world are men. The people who will get the power when these dictators are gone are also men. And they will decide the faith of women in their countries.
In South-American lands such as Nicaragua and Venezuela women are denied abortions. Even if they were raped, or victims of incest. In U.S.America Justin Bieber says to Rolling Stones-magazine that abortion is murder, while rape happens for a reason. Chavez [Venezuela] and Ortega [Nicaragua] are men. Justin Bieber is supposedly male. And they still get the right to speak about and rule over women’s bodies, rights and reproduction, when the women themselves aren’t granted the same chance.
Simone de Beauvoir, one of the best known feminist philosophers, critiqued psychoanalytics (such as Freud), scientists and biologists for using the male as the rule and the women as the exception. Freud even went as far as to say that all women at some point in their life feels like a mutilated man, and that something is missing about them. This is the well-known theory of “penis envy”. [Oh my god, she said penis, right?]
One would think that more than 50 years later this will be better. That the woman is an equal, and not just seen as a secondary creature with a secondary nature, but no. Today, if a woman chooses not to give birth (like Simone de Beauvoir did herself) she is often spoken down to for it. And if a woman, or a girl, chooses to speak up for her beliefs she is automatically labeled a tomboy or a problem child.
The problem I see with the world, and that Simone de Beauvoir also saw, is that women are confined to a certain way of life and thought that people try explaining with science, but that really is nothing more than a social construct. And men uses this social construct to keep their power. This is gender, not sex, and women who don’t fit in are pushed out and away. No wonder it’s hard being a teen-age girl, right?
-“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
-Simone de Beauvoir
And now I’ll return to my writing.
-Frida
A loud and glorious hello!
Chillin’ at the Youth against EU office (an organization which I am as of one month ago in the central board of), I decided to run an entry in the organizations blogg, which I wrote about 2 weeks ago, through google translate. Well, the resulting text turned out so brilliantly that I thought I’d post it here, so I can pretend to update regularely. Wall of text-time!!
“Hello good people.
I am Vegard, one of two bodø residents of the central board. Such stands
great respect. This week, it’s already my turn to blog, and
I’ll tell the story starts on Youth against EU office last
Tuesday.
For once I did not get to the office to find Jonas sitting
alone with lots of accounts ahead and thump thump music (eds. bit-pop) in the speakers.
As the day went and the relatively normal work hours glei past,
most people went home. Only three people remained in the office, namely
me, Angelica and Jonas.
We concluded that we should do something cool and socially, and Jonas had
mysterious heard rumors of a quiz on one of the local water holes, where
sometimes older gentlemen hanging and gulp down a barrel at the barrel of
adult soft drink of the best black. I’m talking of course about the shack!
Wherever we went, with stars in her eyes and faith and hope in your heart. We lose
Never stand on one of the posters hanging on the office wall, and this
tank followed us into enough shack, and guess if it failed!
The first round did the hopeful trio if the group name was Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles to scrape together the pipe of 2 points, out of about 30
possible, and came to a proud 11 space of 11 possible. Joy roar
and High Fives were a lot of the corner of Bula, where we have three
mukterer set, and we were sure: the next round, which was called “Trivia”
where we take us back! And guess if we did, we were able to answer right
on so many issues that we still had an impressive two points after this round
too. Not without reason we changed group name to “the relatively untalented”.
Last round was even worse. We pride ourselves three European opponents must have
escaped us into a fierce debate about Dublin 2 Convention and the
headless immigration policy leads to, for suddenly the man said on the
speaker “now comes the last song in Round 3.” Of course, we reacted
all dedicated kvissdeltakere do: Huh? Has the round started? We
apparently got a consolation point when the points were counted, we had
sharp 3 points. Of the 70 possible.
After the last round, we changed its name to “Gamer we do not golf?”. We got
minimum points, hence we won the somewhat unorthodox popkviss-round. We lose
Never!
C’mon c’mon all veia from Youth against EU office.”
Nice, huh?
The name of the game is figure out what the story actually is.
Vegard!