According to Julie

October 8, 2011

First impressions of living in London

It's been about two and a half weeks since I moved here. I am still not home (it won't feel like home until I have internet access in my apartment), but I look forward to settling in. Here, in no particular order, are some thoughts:

1. Just before leaving Norway, I noticed that I was using the word "practical" too much. I described everything as convenient and useful. Now that I live in London, my new over-used word is "ridiculous." No water pressure in the shower if my flatmate is doing the dishes downstairs? Ridiculous. Purely decorative balconies, with no doors from the house? Ridiculous. It takes 14 days for Virgin Media to connect me to the internet? Ridiculous. I can't buy one beer; I have to buy six? Ridi. no, practical.

2. I like British friendliness to strangers (let's shorten it to FTS). Norwegian FTS doesn't exist in cities. French FTS doesn't exist at all. American FTS goes way too far (There is no way the sales assistants at department stores like my outfits that much). British FTS is all about small talk.

3. Small talk, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily revolve around the weather. The important question is how you got to where the small talk took place. Did you take a bus or a train? How delayed was the London underground today? (Apparently, this last week was historically bad, tube-delay-wise.)

4. The London School of Economics and Political Science (let's shorten that to LSE) wasn't joking when it described itself as "international" and "diverse". I don't think I've met any English students so far. I've met plenty of Norwegians though.

6. There doesn't seem to be ANY connection between what the weather is like and what the English Londoners are wearing.

7. Although I like to believe you can do anything in London, being spontaneous is a lot harder here than in a tiny city like Oslo. It takes you two hours to get anywhere, and once you're there, so are thousands of other people.

8. I think I will start speaking British English with an American accent. Queue is a distinct word, more specific than line. Flat is shorter than apartment. As long as we aren't sharing rooms, I live with my flatmate, not my roommate. Our flat isn't flat though; it has stairs.

9. Most of the advertisements on the underground are for books or cultural events. I like this. And I like that I see so many people on public transport reading novels.

10. I also like that no matter where you go, there will be a pub serving fish and chips and an assortment of beers on tap. I am writing this at my new local pub, surrounded by families, couples, the pub's dog, and a few people like me, with laptops and coffee.

Posted by Julie at 6:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 23, 2011

Quick update

I have just moved to London for a one-year Master of Science in Economic History at LSE. School starts in about a week. My wrist is completely healthy, and my new laptop has plenty of half-finished blog posts. I am in the process of moving for the fourth time in two months.

Posted by Julie at 12:29 AM | TrackBack

August 7, 2011

Writing soon

A quick update on the wrist situation: I had an operation about a month ago. It wasn't tendinitis, but a ganglion. I feel much better now - and I'm writing this with both hands! - but I am still not quite well enough to write full time. I will be back soon. Very soon.

If you can read Norwegian, check out my dad's blog post about all of this.

Posted by Julie at 12:50 PM | TrackBack

June 6, 2011

Not writing

I'm not writing. No blogging, no Twitter, no E24. I have tendinitis, a repetitive strain injury, in my right hand. My physiotherapist says it's probably De Quervain syndrome. I just know that I have a bump on my right wrist, and writing (typing or by hand), as well as using a mouse or trackpad, hurts - and keeps hurting for days.

I can read. I can dance. But I can't write. I am slowly typing this with my left hand. For almost as long as I can remember, writing has been my all-purpose solution - my work, my fun, my therapy. Without it, I don't feel like myself - but I will be back.

Posted by Julie at 6:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 21, 2011

I can't take my eyes off of you... 'til I find somebody new

Closer opens with Natalie Portman and Jude Law in slow motion, to the sound of Damien Rice. You would think the scene were designed specifically to appeal to my senses - well, mine and most girls my age in 2004.

I saw this movie twice in the movie theater back then, and I bought Damien Rice's album O because of this scene. Most of my friends found the movie depressing. My boss voiced vague concerns about my mental health* when I played O at work. But I don't feel depressed when I hear sad music or see a sad story about four more or less messed up people. If you're feeling blue and for some ridiculous reason want to drag yourself even further down, watch a romantic comedy. Wonder why your life doesn't look like that. If you want to be feel better, seek catharsis. I find sad movies somewhat comforting in their brutal honesty - and in the way they remind me that at least I'm not a character in Closer.

And so, seven years and another Damien Rice album later, I'm still fascinated and impressed by how complex Closer manages to be, even though it's just four characters interacting in a handful of scenes over a period of four years. The trailer tagline is "If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking." It's about dating, cheating, hurting people, but actually it's about how even when we're trying to be confident, rational and responsible, emotions and impulses can lead us to make decisions we know are stupid and hurtful.

Of course I identify with Natalie Portman's character because she's the one who plays a 24-year-old girl. But she's also the one who tells her possessive, complicated writer boyfriend, when he's just announced that although he loves her, he's leaving her for someone he just helplessly fell in love with:

"Oh, as if you had no choice?!?! There's a moment, there's always a moment: I can do this, I can give into this, or I can resist it. And I don't know when your moment was, but I bet you there was one."

To her, the only way to leave is by saying: I don't love you anymore. Good-bye. And if you still love someone, you don't leave. Which means that while she seems to submit completely and love unconditionally, it's with the knowledge that she has absolute unbreakable rules about how things are supposed to work. Like in her job as a stripper, she gives everything, up until a certain irrevocable limit.

And I think that's the point of this story, which so many of my friends found pointless: How much control do we really have over our emotions? When do we stop acting rationally? When does the game suddenly become too real? Or as Roger Ebert writes in a review you really shouldn't read until after you've seen the film:

There is the sense that their trusts and betrayals are not fundamentally important to them; "You've ruined my life," one says, and then is told, "You'll get over it."

Yes, unless, fatally, true love does strike at just that point when all the lies have made it impossible. Is there anything more pathetic than a lover who realizes he (or she) really is in love, after all the trust has been lost, all the bridges burnt and all the reconciliations used up?

(Vaguely) related post: Love means not leaving

* I'm doing very well, thank you. If you're not as happy as I am, here are 11 ways to feel better.

Posted by Julie at 12:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 17, 2011

The world is enough

Tim Minchin's poem "Storm" is brilliant, and really doesn't require a comment from me. Here's a quote:

Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that an afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you, frighten you?
Does the notion that there might not be a supernatural so blow your hippie noodle that you'd rather just stand in the fog of your inability to google?
Isn't this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap man-made myths and monsters?
- Tim Minchin, Storm

... and I've published the full animated video below.

  
(Image via Atheist Etiquette)

Posted by Julie at 1:37 PM | TrackBack

April 11, 2011

To all my champagne people...

"We have a champagne relationship, protected from a lot of the everyday wear and tear that other couples go through. We are free to do as we wish, but at the same time we know we love each other and that whenever we meet, it's fantastic."
- Victora Bugge Øye, interviewed by the magazine D2 about her long-distance relationship (my translation)

If my life were to be retold in film, and to realistically portray the big emotional moments, it would have to include scenes like this: I sit on my couch, staring, shocked, at an e-mail. My cell phone beeps just as I am waking up, and I start the day with a little dance of joy when I read the text I just got. I log onto Google talk in the middle of the night when I can't sleep without a few lines of encouragement from the other side of the world. I hide behind a tree in the center of Oslo to cry and scream into my cell phone. On opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, my best friend and I each open a bottle of Sam Adams and toast each other via Skype.

Has anyone done that yet: Made a film where the protagonist is always physically alone, only shown interacting with characters through videochat, Facebook, e-mail, blogging, phone calls etc.? Because some of the most important characters in the story of my life have been people who are hardly ever there in the geographical sense. But they are always there in the sense that matters: there for me.

I fill my long-distance friends in on my life in great big heaps of information. Sometimes just composing a response to "So, what is new with you?" can be a way of clearing my own head, making sense of my priorities.  There is no time to waste on everyday small complaints, but for the real problems I prefer to go to my long-distance people, the ones who do not have to deal with my life every day.

Perhaps I just want someone to accept my side of things. Long-distance friend won't say "Really, that guy?" when I describe a crush, because they've never met him. Long-distance friends won't let a secret about me slip out when they talk to my co-workers or family members. Long-distance friends won't notice if I skip past the boring or embarrasing details of a story. And yet, long-distance friends manage - again and again - to call me out on it when I'm not being completely honest with them or myself. Because they've been listening.

Distance has a way of focusing the attention within a friendship. There is no need to involve anyone else, to introduce friends to friends, boyfriends to families, no need to struggle with integrating the person I am when I talk to Friend A with the person I am when I talk to Friend B. Instead of going to parties with groups of other people, we interact in one long two-person conversation.

When people say online communication is impersonal, I don't understand what they mean. On the contrary, it can be immensely personal, if it works like this: I think of you, and I tell you so immediately. I don't have to wait until I see you to let you know I had a thought you should know about. You are directly connected to my thoughts.

That being said, sometimes I need a hug. And sometimes I need a hug from someone specific, someone who lives too far away.

And maybe I do idolize my long-distance loves because I don't have to deal with them on a regular basis. Whenever we see each other, it's a cause for celebration, for champagne. Like at most events involving champagne, we gloss over the imperfections and pretend there won't be a tomorrow. But maybe that's a good thing. Sometimes it's best to view life as a series of beautiful moments. That's what my (roommate who happens to be a) therapist says.  

Knowing you are loved - even from a distance - can be enormously comforting whenever your geographically close life feels less than great. Drinking water alone is easier when you know there will be someone to drink champagne with someday soon.

The photo was taken in Paris, by Julie Balise. We drank champagne on the last day we lived in the same country.

Posted by Julie at 1:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 6, 2011

Meme

I like question-and-answer memes because I like answering questions about myself (embarrassing, but true. I also like filling in questionaires.) But I also like memes because when I go back and read the archives, the answers are like a little piece of frozen time, with tiny details of my life that I would never specifically blog about. So even though a meme is not really "serious" enough for my blog (eh, whatever), here's one:

1. Make a list of 5 things that are in your bag: (these are the first five things I find)
- red leather gloves
- the latest issue of argument
- dance shoes
- black shoe shine
- red nail polish

2. What is the significance of your journal name?
This website is run by my own rules, according to Julie, which is my name. It was the working title when my dad first set up this site ages ago, and the fact that it shows up top of peoples' alphabetized blog rolls is nice.

3. What is one item of clothing you wish you could always wear?
Nothing. I mean, I crave variety.

4. What do you plan to do after this meme?
Go test a coffee shop while editing a book.

5. What are you listening to right now?
Ella Fitzgerald

6. Who was the last person you hugged?
One of my dance partners, as we said good-bye on the subway after dance class.

7. What was the last thing you downloaded?
A draft of the book I'm editing.

8. What did you do today?
Not much so far. Blogged.

9. What was the last game you played?
The game of Life, with my family last Sunday.

10. What websites do you always visit when you go online?
Gmail. E24. Facebook. Also Twitter, via Tweetdeck.

11. What irritates you nearly on a daily basis?
Moziers/slow walkers. Actually, make that slowness in communication/transportation in general, including buses, walking, internet access and people who don't answer their phones.

12. If you could afford to go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
South Africa, as the only reason I'm not there now is that I can't afford it.

13. What did you want to be when you were a kid?
Age 4: A witch, or a librarian. Then I found out that so many librarians are witches, and changed my career plans. 
Age 6: An actess.
Age 8: An actress first, then an author of children's books.
Age 10: A writer 
Age 12: A writer.

14. Ever had a weird dream? What was it about?
I have a lot of weird dreams. I find them entertaining, but then I tend to forget them.

15. What are you doing this weekend?
Learning the Lindy Hop. 

16. If you could play any musical instrument, which one would you play?
Piano.

17. What's the one thing you need the most now?
A solution to a problem that I'm not going to blog about.

18. If you could have one superpower, what kind of power would you choose?
Time travel.

19. What was the last thing you ate?
Wasa crackers with cream cheese and pesto.

20. A feature that you like about yourself.
My hands.

Posted by Julie at 12:08 PM | TrackBack

Not leaving

You may well wonder why I wanted Boris at all, a man who tells his still-wife that he's shacking up with his new squeeze for "practical reasons", as if this shocking new arrangement is simply a matter of New York real estate. I wondered why I wanted him myself. Had Boris left me after two years or even ten, the damage would have been considerably less. Thirty years is a long time, and a marriage acquires an ingrown, almost incestuous quality, with complex rhythms of feeling, dialogue and associations. We had come to the point where listening to a story or anecdote at a dinner party would simultaniously prompt the same thought in our two heads, and it was simply a matter of which one of us would articulate it first. Our memories had also begun to mingle. Boris would swear up and down that he was the one who came upon the great blue heron standing on the doorstep of the house we rented in Maine, and I am just as certain that I saw the enormous bird alone and told him about it. There is no answer to the riddle, no documentation - just the flimsy, shifting tissue of remembering and imagining. One of us had listened to the other tell the story, had seen in his or her mind the encounter with the bird, and had created a memory from the mental images that accompanied the heard narrative. Inside and outside are easily confused. You and I. Boris and Mia.
- From The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt.

Siri Hustvedt's The Summer Without Men starts with Boris leaving Mia, and follows Mia's summer of interacting only with women. It's about mothers and daughters, old friends, new friends, and the cruelty of teenage girls. And it's about what happens when your Most Important Person over the last thirty years just leaves.

I haven't known anyone for thirty years, for obvious reasons. But as always, Hustvedt's characters seem so real that I find myself relating to them anyway. I told my mom - who's known my dad since they were seventeen - the story of the heron, and she could relate.

And I can certainly understand the feeling of losing part of yourself when you lose an Important Person. Or rather, feeling like you can't let that person go, because even if you never see them again, your personalities are so entwined that they will always be with you - in your memories, your associations, your tastes, in the way your mind works.

In another book I recently read, love was defined like this: "Love means not leaving." Maybe it is that simple.

More posts about Hustvedt's books:

• Nye venner fra Hustvedt (my review of Sorrows of an American, in Norwegian)
• Reuniting with Leo

Image: icanread

Posted by Julie at 10:51 AM | TrackBack

March 25, 2011

3 quotes

I photographed this in London, March 2011.

Posted by Julie at 2:40 PM | TrackBack

March 20, 2011

How to be successful and know everything about the universe

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

 

I'm working on a blog post that has veered into "Can I really publish this or is it too personal?"-territory. So while I figure that one out, enjoy XKCD.

And don't worry about me. I feel like this guy.

(Original image links here and here)

Posted by Julie at 1:44 PM | TrackBack

February 15, 2011

Extremely hot

I thought this was a sweet PostSecret. But realistically, the person receiving these coffee messages is either being completely oblivious or just politely ignoring them.

Posted by Julie at 12:18 PM | TrackBack

February 3, 2011

Lost

My back-up hard drive stopped working today. It won't turn on, and I don't know yet if the data on it was lost. Naturally, it's a back-up hard drive, so anything important on it is also somewhere else. But that's not the point.

The point is that I feel lost.

This was supposed to be the little box where my photos from Paris and my journal entries from the university years are safe, even if (ok, probably when) my beloved laptop gives up on me. And then the back-up died first. That which was supposed to keep me safe, turned out to be weak.

When I was a little girl, my dad showed me a picture book about what happened to people who didn't back up their files. They were eaten by monsters.

This was probably not a children's story, but a brochure designed to sell back-up software. I still grew up to be something of a digital hoarder. I once saved a text message for three years, transferring it from phone to phone. My digital music collection is obsessively organized, even though I usually just use Spotify. When a friend dropped his laptop on the floor, I asked him: "You had back-up right?" He told me that was the worst possible thing to say, and I felt quilty about if for weeks.

Now this loss, mere months after losing my RSS archive Bloglines, has made me paranoid. Are our files never safe? Between the cloud, where I am at the mercy of companies located on the other side of the world, and local storage, where technology just randomly dies, should I just learn to live archiveless? It's not like I want a physical archive.

And what if my laptop chooses this week to break down for ever?

If I were suddenly without files, would I be ok?

All the decent Paris photos are on Facebook. My best writing is published or e-mailed to someone. Most of my music is available either on Spotify or on some torrent site. I would mourn some of my favorite photographs and a few specific journal entries and writing experiments. And when the sheer inconvenience and missed deadlines blew over, I would be fine.

When I looked through the journal entries just two days ago, I found old documents that I have deleted from their original place on my laptop. Forgotten details of events that made such an impact on me that I wrote short story-ish accounts of them. Texts I liked enough to cut and paste from other blogs. Collages of party photos. Digital memories.

I don't need them, but I'm glad I looked through them. And just like I want to be able to read my journals from grade school (those notebooks are in a cardboard box in my parents' attic), I want to be able to read today's unbloggable personal writing ten years from now. Call me a hoarder, but at least I mainly hoard words.

So developers who want to make something upscale and sophisticated: Don't make me an app. I want the digital file version of those super secret bank vaults where they store treasure in the movies. I want to be able to tell someone: guard these files for generations; my great-great-grandchildren should be able to look at these photos and read these words.

Images: 1 and 2

Posted by Julie at 9:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 2, 2011

Bilingual infatuation

My Twitter followers want me to define love. Ok, here goes.

Last night, I posted a list of words missing from the English language, and one of them was "forelsket".

I woke up this morning to a list of @mentions on Twitter about the difference between the English "in love" and the Norwegian "forelsket".

Seriously, Twitter? You think I know the answer to that one? Well, I'll try.

In my head, "forelsket" is how you feel between just having a crush on someone and actually realizing you are in love with them.

I guess if I were to use both my languages to describe how love evolves, it would be something like this: I like someone in general (conveniently, same word in both languages), I have a crush (which at least one friend of mine has directly translated into English as "ha et knus"), I feel "forelsket", I fall in love. This doesn't necessarily happen in that order, but on a scale of not-serious to very-serious, that's how it works.

Is forelsket the same as infatuated? Not really. Infatuated implies silliness, irrationality and superficiality. "Forelskelse" is hardly rational, but it's not as stupid/crazy as infatuation. If I ever describe myself as infatuated, it's because I know I'm completely stupid and out-of-character, and that this insane crush will blow over any minute. On the other hand, I can be forelsket for a frightening amount of time.

When I listen to friends who only speak English or watch movies in English, and someone says "I think I'm in love", I think: "No dear, you're forelsket. You just don't have that word in your vocabulary, poor thing." I guess forelsket is that giddy, excited feeling that's telling you someone is very interesting. Forelskelse is when you have a theory that you might be able to fall in love with someone, but you just don't know them well enough to tell yet.

Privately, I think that all the words I know, in English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Khmer, Thai, Italian, Spanish*, are all one big vocabulary. Sometimes I can use all my words, sometimes only a few, depending on who I'm talking to.

I also appreciate the British verb "fancy" and the American "hooking up" (I interpret it as an intentionally ambivalent way of saying "Something physical happened, but I'm not going to give you any details."). I think the Norwegian "kjæreste" is more serious than the English "boyfriend/girlfriend". Saying "I love you" in English is nowhere near as big a deal as saying it in Norwegian.

Even when no one else agrees with my definitions (or even understands me at all), speaking two languages fluently gives me twice as many ways to think about everything. There are some feelings I can only express in English and some I can only express in Norwegian, but in my own thoughts, I can sort out my emotions using my whole vocabulary.

Related posts: Love in any language and I want to live in English

* I only speak two languages fluently, but I do know words in all of these languages. And the list looked cool.

Image: Premshree Pillai, Creative Commons

Posted by Julie at 1:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 31, 2010

Greatest hits 2010

My favorite blog posts, and some other stuff I wrote in 2010.

Blog posts in English:

The Fur trilogy starts here My opinions on fur, from fashion to ethics to business.

Love in any language Why Norwegian is sometimes better than English

I want to live in English Why English is usually better than Norwegian

You’re a kitty! The law of cat proximity works with any furry animal.

South Africa through taxi windows "If we want to get to a time when black and white doesn't matter, we need a hell of a lot of taxis."

Why I don’t want to read anything written for women If men don't care, why should I?

Bloggposter på norsk:

Eplesett! Reaksjoner på iTingen Alle jeg følger på Twitter latterliggjorde iPaden da den ble lansert. Og jeg lærte at hvis jeg blogger om Apple, får jeg flere lesere.

Verdien av Precious Se denne filmen!

Jeg vil ta master i verdensvitenskap! Tverrfaglighet FTW.

Generasjon Facebook – endelig en bok om meg!  I like to think I'm like everyone else, but I guess that makes me unique.

7 “uskrevne regler” for nettavisers forsider Hvordan lage nettavisforsider

iPensum – Jeg skriver om Apple, for å gi bloggen flere lesere Hvorfor vi skriver så mye Apple? Fordi dere bryr dere så innmarri. Men jeg skal slutte nå.

Investering i estetisk kapital Det nærmeste jeg har kommet å starte min egen blogg-meme. Nerding om hvor mye tid jeg bruker på mitt eget utseende.

Hva skjedde med de norske bloggerne? De er på Twitter.

Tekster jeg skrev utenfor bloggen:

LES DENNE BLOGGPOSTEN! Hvordan klikkhoreri fungerer Hvorfor vi nettjournalister horer ut nyhetene, skrevet for argument

Intelligente nyheter i illusjonenes tid Bak kulissene i Dagsrevyen, med Christian Borch, for argument

Kritikk av gode hensikter Bistandskritikk for argument

Sør-Afrika gjennom taxivinduer En busstur gjennom Western Cape er en reise gjennom apartheidgeografi, basert på blogging, oversatt for argument.

Papirstøtte Kommentar om mediestøtte, skrevet for Minerva

Sommer i E24 – media, mat og mac Sommervikariatet i E24 oppsummert med 3 m-er.

Foredrag:

Journalist i sosiale medier For Østlendingen, Edda Media

Hvorfor lærere bør blogge (og forslag til hvordan) For NKS Nettstudier

Photo credit: ashlee

Posted by Julie at 11:44 AM | TrackBack

December 28, 2010

Is foie gras ok after all?

In Why foie gras is not unethical, food site Serious Eats investigates the conditions at American foie gras farms. According to their research, ducks are fine with being force-fed so their livers grow to ten percent of their total body weight (there's a video of the process, called gavage, in the article). The life of a foie gras duck is - apparently - more comfortable than the life of an average chicken.

So why does foie gras have a bad reputation? J. Kenzi Lopez-Alt writes:

"In large part, it's because foie gras is an easy target. There are only three foie farms in the country, and none of them have the money or government clout to defend themselves the way that the chicken or beef industry does. It's a food product that is marketed directly at the affluent, and the rich are always an easy target. As an occasional delicacy, it's also a food that's relatively easy for most people to give up.

Personally, I find this kind of protesting abhorrent. If you are going to protest anything, it should be the industrial production of eggs, where chickens are routinely kept in cages so small that they can't even turn around for an entire year. The problem, of course, is that you tell people to stop eating cheap eggs, and nobody will listen."

It's the same point I tried to make about fur last year: The debate is confusing, boycotting something you would never buy anyway is useless, and (assuming you're ok with animals being killed by human beings at all) it should be possible to produce these products ethically.

I love the taste of foie gras, but are French farms as gentle as the American ones? Can I believe the information in this article? Or is the real story here that I should avoid eggs (at least in the US)?

Photo: ulterior epicure (Creative Commons)

Posted by Julie at 3:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 26, 2010

Stuff to read

Looking around the internet for interesting articles and blog posts, now that you're on Christmas vacation and finally have time to read? Here are some suggestions.

True story: I survived a crazy childhood I like Sarah Von's True Story series, where she posts interviews of people with interesting experiences on her blog.  I recommend the one about the ex-stripper and the one about the ex-drug addict too.

Charm offensive by Paul Carr - How British men pulled off the most brilliant PR coup the world has ever seen.

The real cost of free by Cory Doctorow - "Those who say that they can control copies are wrong, and they will not profit by their strategy. They should be entitled to ruin their own lives, businesses and careers, but not if they're going to take down the rest of society in the process."

A holiday message about being an atheist by Ricky Gervais - "You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts."

How the rise of e-readers takes the fun out of giving books by Leah McLaren. I still want to do a whole blog post on this one, but in the meantime, just read it.

The real "stuff white people like" from Gizmodo. "How are whites, blacks, Asians, whoever different from everybody else? What tastes, interests, and concepts define an ethnicity? Is there any way to make fun of other races in public and get away with it? These are big questions, and here's how we answered them."

What we can learn from procrastination - You put off reading this article when I first tweeted about it. Now you have time!

Picture source

Posted by Julie at 2:52 PM | TrackBack

December 20, 2010

Christmas music countdown: 12 “new” Christmas songs

I have come to a sad (no, not really sad) conclusion: It's almost impossible for me to blog twice a day when I have a life, but don't have a good way of scheduling automatic publishing. Luckily, the Wall Street Journal has blogged about Christmas music too. Here's their list of 12 relatively new (defined as less than 50 year old) Christmas songs.

It kind of bugs me that they included Last Christmas. That song is just irritating. But I guess I shouldn't complain when I'm this slow at updating.

Posted by Julie at 12:50 PM | TrackBack

December 15, 2010

Christmas music countdown: Why I don't want anything for Christmas (and I'm probably not getting you anything either)

I have no interest in spending any time, money or energy on Christmas gifts this year.

Usually I really enjoy it. I've never understood people who find Christmas stressful. Hosting parties, giving gifts or preparing turkey isn't work, unless you're getting paid for it. If it feels like slave labor, stop.

So this year, I'm stopping. The gift thing, that is.

No, I have not turned into a Grinch. I LOVE giving gifts. I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes from knowing that I figured out what you wanted - even better if I figured it out before you really knew yourself - and got it for you. If I love you, and I make you happy, that means I won! I mean, don't we all feel that way?

The problem is, this is less fun at Christmas, because you're expecting it. And because you'll give me stuff which I may enjoy, but which I I could easily have done without. Our money could be put to better use in some other way.

Christmas gifts make no economic sense. You spend money on something someone else doesn't want, and you get something you don't want in return.

I must have been about ten when I first thought about this. My family had recently moved from one apartment in the US to a much, much smaller one in Norway, and I realized that I owned too much. I wanted space for Christmas. "Everyone just gives each other STUFF, with no regard to what they're supposed to do with it," I thought.

To be honest though, I wanted some stuff too. I was ten, with no budget of my own. Whenever I wanted something, I would hint and hope until the next gift-recieving opportunity (September or December). Gifts were my main source of income.

These days, I work for a living. And I try to save as much of that money as possible for a future when I potentially won't be working, because I'll be at grad school or travelling or just being an unemployed journalist. I don't want to take my savings and convert them into candles, soap and Christmas ornaments. Or into something I might love, something special because it came from someone special, something so special that I have to take it with me wherever I move, which means I can never just leave, because I love too many THINGS, and they won't fit into my suitcase.

There are plenty of traditional Christmas songs that in all seriousness claim that gift-receiving (yes, only receiving. I've never given Santa anything) is the point of Christmas. Santa Claus is coming to town, for one.

Here's the original Santa Baby by Eartha Kitt, plus a remix. This Christmas song, about a woman's wish list including an apartment, a car and a fur coat, is actually not the most materialistic, over-the-top disgusting Christmas song ever. This is. ("On the 8th day of Christmas my baby gave to me: a pair of Chloe shades and diamond belly ring. (...) How I love him for his generosity." Ugh.)

No, out of all the songs about Santa and gift-giving, Santa Baby is my favorite. Because it's a joke. Flirting with Santa Claus so that he will get you jewellery is so disgusting that it's funny.

I tend to prefer the songs that suggest partying is the point of Christmas. And I don't mean eggnog, Jingle Bell Rock and mistle-toe as an excuse for drunken hook-ups. I mean spending time with friends.

This philosophy led my friends to pool our gift-giving budgets and go out to dinner together last year instead of exchanging gifts. We're doing the same thing this year. I love it.

Because really, all I want for Christmas is you. If you want to give me something, give me memories. I can take them with me even if I want to travel with just a carry-on. Take me out to dinner. Or sit down on a couch with me, (possibly open a bottle of wine) and give your full attention to our conversation for a few hours. Or invite me over and introduce me to your favorite movie.

Or give me a list of your favorite books and enough Amazon dollars to choose one of them for my Kindle.

Or give me money. I will think of you gratefully when your contribution becomes 5% of my plane ticket to Cape Town, or half of a book I want to read. Or a tiny little fraction of tuition at grad school. And because I'm more relaxed and less poor, when we're out windowshopping and you look at some item for longer than necessary, I will get it for you. And I will feel like I won.

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December 14, 2010

Christmas Music Countdown: Silence

Continue reading for music videos

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December 12, 2010

Christmas music countdown: What are you doing New Year's Eve?

I have no idea what my answer to that question is, and last year that would have been a serious source of stress. This year, I hope to somehow combine friends and champagne. And follow my rules for a successful New Year's celebration.

Here's four versions of today's song on Spotify and one on Youtube.

Image source

Posted by Julie at 9:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 11, 2010

Christmas music countdown

Not much time for blogging today; I am sorting books again. Here is last year´s Christmas post for the 11th. And this is the song of the day on Spotify.

Posted by Julie at 4:59 PM | TrackBack

December 10, 2010

Christmas music countdown: Let it snow!

This version of this song always makes me want to dance. Fortunately, that's exactly what I'm going to do tonight. Which is why this post is short. No time to blog - I'm going dancing!

Posted by Julie at 4:30 PM | TrackBack

December 9, 2010

Christmas Music Countdown: Blue Christmas

Here's "Blue Christmas" by A Fine Frenzy, who released a five-song "Christmas LP" last year.

And here's the whole LP as a YouTube playlist

Posted by Julie at 5:25 PM | TrackBack

December 8, 2010

Have yourself a merry little Christmas countdown

Have yourself a merry, little Christmas just might be my favorite Christmas song. Because if you're happy, a sad song won't make you sad. And if you're sad, you don't want someone telling you this is "the most wonderful time of the year."

I blogged about Christmas depression last year. Apparently, it just isn't true that there are more suicides at Christmas. But if you're feeling depressed - or just not-that-merry - statistics won't help. So here's Tori Amos' version of this song:

Also check out my post 11 ways to feel better. I've tried them all.

This post is dedicated to my good friend Aina, who also loves Tori Amos, and who is also doing a Christmas music countdown this year.

Posted by Julie at 4:26 PM | TrackBack

December 7, 2010

Christmas music countdown: Scary Christmas

Exactly one year ago, the Christmas countdown was Carol of the Bells and the rest of the Home Alone soundtrack. I blogged about how this movie probably contributed to my lifelong fear of burglars, and my recurring nightmare that someone would climb in through my bedroom window.

Then I casually mentioned that when a burglar finally did climb in through my bedroom window, it was almost a let-down. There was no soundtrack, for one thing.

That post got some people very worried, so I thought I should tell you the whole story this time. Here goes:

In 2008, I went to a big summer party. The kind that involves sitting around at picnic tables in someone's enormous back yard, drinking wine and having long, conversations that seem to flow from topic to topic effortlessly until it seems like you've turned the minds of everyone around the table inside out and explored all the random associations and interesting opinions and funny stories you can find there. By the time you reach that stage, it is much too late for anyone to go home, so the house is filled with overnight guests, and I was one of them.

So technically, when I woke up in the middle of the night to find a man halfway through the bedroom window, it wasn't MY bedroom window. It was the window in the room where I happened to sleep one night. Which in retrospect probably made the experience less scary overall; I didn't have to sleep in that room the night after. But anyway, less than an hour after going to sleep, I woke up to find a man climbing through the window. He was wearing a white linen shirt and carrying pink, plastic gloves. And he had definitely not been one of the party guests.

We stared at each other for a couple of seconds, both frozen in surprise. Then he said: "I think I'm in the wrong house."

"Yes, I think you are," I answered. He climbed out again.

And I started to drift back to sleep. I wonder what would have happened if I had just dozed off again. Maybe I would have woken up to a much emptier house. Or maybe nothing would have happened, and I would have believed for the rest of my life that this was yet another nightmare about burglars.

Fortunately, some small part of my brain was awake, sober and sensible enough to realize that this was not a dream. I got up, borrowed a bathrobe and walked around the house, checking all the rooms, making sure all the windows and doors were closed and locked. And then I made my way to the front porch, where my father and some other party guests were sleeping on mattresses. The man in white linen was standing over them, still holding the gloves.

When he saw me, he said: "Um... I'm the neighbor."

"No, you're not," I said, and then he started to run.

I woke my dad, and we ran after him.

If you had peered over the fence and into the back yard of this house at around 4:30 AM that night, you would have seen me running around in a white bathrobe, chasing a man in white linen pants and a white linen shirt, around white picnic tables with opened wine bottles and plastic glasses.  Behind me, still more or less asleep, my father followed. The chase probably lasted for less than a minute, before whoever-he-was succeeded (on his second attempt) to jump the fence.

My dad and I just stood there for a while, waking up. I'm very glad he was there, not because I was scared at the time, but because I know that the intruder was really there. Whoever he was.

If not for the gloves, I would have assumed he was a drunk guest at someone else's party, and that he literally did not know what he was doing. I mean, who breaks into houses wearing something that needs to be ironed? We didn't hear about any similar break-ins in the area. But the lying, the gloves, the fact that he didn't leave, the fact that he attempted to enter the house through a room that was always empty, except for that one night - it all seems like a badly planned, but still planned attempt to break in.

Which means that I can cross that off my list of experiences: I have chased away an intruder. And I've had a recurring nightmare come true. And I'm fine.

I haven't had that nightmare since.

Illustration source

Posted by Julie at 9:20 PM | TrackBack

December 6, 2010

Christmas music countdown: The Christmas Price Index

This year, your true love will pay a lot more for turtledoves.

2009 gave us an increase in the price of French hens, a decline in the price of a partridge in a pear tree, and a discussion on whether or not ladies dancing would accept a lower wage. I am (obviously?) referring to the 2009 Christmas Price Index.

Today's Christmas countdown music is The 12 Days of Christmas. Each year PNC Wealth Management calculates how much all of the gifts that "my true love gave to me" would cost with today's prices. Then they compare that to the cost of twelve days of Christmas the year before.

This year, well, you can see it for yourself here. After a year of working for a business website, getting economic data presented in pop-up book form is... well... weird. And they present this as though inflation is always a bad thing. Look past all that, or maybe watch the Bloomberg interview instead of the cartoonish website.

The total cost of Christmas is up 9,2% since 2009. This is the largest price increase since 2003, and the second largest since the index began 27 years ago.

The price of gold hit an all-time this year and might reach a new record high about now. That means all those golden rings will cost a true love 30% more than in 2009.

The milkmaids represent the minimum wage, which did not increase this year. However, lords a-leaping and ladies dancing were playing catch-up after 2009, according to the index. The ladies dancing and lords a-leaping have seen a 300% increase in their fees over the past 27 years. Strangely enough, female dancers' wages were up 15% in 2009 and then an additional 15% this year. (Last year Norwegian economist Harald Magnus Andreassen wondered how dancing ladies could possibly be that expensive in the 2009 job market)

Of course the factors in the cost of Christmas are kind of random. Dancers' wages and the cost of birds are probably not the best indicators of how the American economy is doing. Still, since the index started, the price of the goods in the index have decreased relative to the price of services - especially the cost of entertainment. That sounds familiar (and it's been happening in the Norwegian music business too). And this year, the jump in the price of French hens is primarily feed costs, according to PNC's James Dunigan. Which again makes sense.

Posted by Julie at 10:48 PM | TrackBack

December 5, 2010

Christmas music countdown: Jingle Bells

The easiest way to make me feel like it's Christmas is to play me a jazz song involving sleigh rides and snow. Strangely enough, most of my favorite Christmas songs are about winter and parties, not Christmas specifically.

Posted by Julie at 5:16 PM | TrackBack

Book list

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your notes. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (reading it right now)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Book nerds! What have you read?

Posted by Julie at 5:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 4, 2010

Christmas music countdown: Stink, stank, stunk

"You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, Mr. Grinch. Given the choice between the two of you, I'd take the seasick crocodile."

The original How the Grinch stole Christmas is the best Christmas movie. Here are five things that make it great.

Posted by Julie at 11:23 PM | TrackBack

December 3, 2010

Christmas music countdown: All I want for Christmas is…

Love Actually

YouTube won't let me embed it, but here is the scene with that song.

It's a perfect example of how songs I actually don't like, can become songs I kind of love, just because of context. More on that here and here.

Posted by Julie at 4:01 PM | TrackBack

December 2, 2010

Christmas music countdown: White Christmas

Christmas song of the day: White Christmas

The word of the day yesterday was palingenesis. This has nothing to do with American politics. It means rebirth. Like renaissance, or what I'm doing with this repeat of last year's blog series.

Posted by Julie at 12:37 PM | TrackBack

November 23, 2010

Impulsive concentration

"(W)hen that kind of focus springs to life - when interest becomes visceral, when caring becomes palpable, when you're so focused on something that the rest of the world melts away - the learning that results tends to be rich and sticky and sweet. The kind that you carry with you throughout your life. The kind that becomes a part of you. The kind that turns, soon enough, into wisdom.

It's a kind of learning, though, that can't be forced - because it relies for its initial spark on something that is as ineffable as it is intense. Interest has a way of sneaking up on you: One day, you're a normal person, caring about normal things like sports and music and movies - and the next a Beatles song comes on the radio, and suddenly you're someone who cares not just about sports and music and movies, but also about the melodic range of the sitar. Even if you don't want, necessarily, to be somebody who cares about the melodic range of the sitar. Interests are often liberating; occasionally, they're embarrassing. Either way, you can't control them. They, in fact, control you."

Quote from Megan Garber in Attention vs. distraction - What that big New York Times story leaves out

And here's that big New York Times story: Growing up digital, wired for distraction I couldn't bring myself to read the whole thing, because I am so sick of being told that my ability to multi-task is a bad thing, and that I can't concentrate because I'm under 25. (I'm blogging this in between editing photos, updating E24, and keeping up with Twitter, and I think I'm doing ok).

Garber sums up the counter-argument perfectly here:

"(T)he digital era is bringing a new kind of empowerment not just to interest, but to aversion. The web is a space whose very abundance of information - and whose very informational infrastructure - trains our attention to follow our interests."

(That's why online headlines have to be straightforward.)

Related posts:

• Multi-tasking and concentration
• I am a constant gamer

Posted by Julie at 2:24 PM | TrackBack

October 13, 2010

Suit up!

To quote Barney Stinson: "Suit's are awesome."

Wednesday October 13th is International Suit Up Day, celebrating the show How I met your mother, the character Barney Stinson, and the outfit The Suit.

Although I'm generally sceptical of any "it's so unfair that women can't do this" whining, I agree with this Norwegian blogger about the following:

"The man's suit is a genius concept. It does men many favors and simplifies their lives. (...) While there are ugly and unfashionable suits, it's a fact that all men can look f*cking good in a suit. Men are more manly, more male in suits (...) Long-sleeved shirts, a blazer and trousers hide bad skin, scars, sweat, hair, fat and any other body issues. Suits turn boys into men, while still flattering older men." (My translation)

I recommend the whole post if you read Norwegian. In summary: Men have this go-to outfit that says "I'm professional and serious, and it's totally a coincidence that I look hot at the same time." Women simply don't have an equivalent.

What do we wear when men wear suits? Sure, we can wear suits, and look cool:

... but it will be inevitably be described as "women wearing menswear", possibly because it's "trendy" (Note to fashion journalists: It's not a trend if it's been around for a century.).

Or we can wear fitted dresses, recommended by the Financial Times... but they can easily cross the line into too dressy or too fitted.

Women often end up looking like they either put too much effort into their appearance, or not enough. Pencil skirts and heels are more secretary than boss, while an actual suit can end up looking like a costume.

But hey, Suit Up Day is not about complaining. In a world according to Julie, it would be about all the men I meet wearing suits for just one day. That would be great...

In the meantime, I can put on a blazer and watch How I met your mother. Videos below...

How to suit up:

Barney Stinson's best catchphrase:

And of course, the suit song:

Posted by Julie at 12:05 AM | TrackBack

October 12, 2010

My desktop, my world

"The reality of life today means that you can't always be there, and in fact you have to take that idea of that working space with you. Probably what's going to happen in the future is that the desk becomes more a state of mind than an actual physical place." - Alice Twemlow, design critic.

My Desk, to use the capitalization and idea presented in this video, is the laptop I'm blogging this from. It's a Toshiba Equium A100-299 to be precise, which I bought after some deliberation in the winter of 2007. It is the only computer I have chosen and bought myself (after growing up working on my dad's cast-offs and technical experiments), and I'm reluctant to upgrade or replace it because it is just right. The keyboard never makes my wrists tired. The Firefox browser is full of extras like Readability, Feedly and TreeStyle. My blog platform, Windows Live Writer (the only good part of Windows Live IMO), includes locally stored blog post drafts and an archive of potential illustrations. TweetDeck looks better on this screen than the bigger one at work or the smaller one in my purse. I use the photographs I'm kind of proud of as desktop backgrounds. I've really settled down with this computer.

I love the idea of working from anywhere, and my netbook, Evernote and Gmail make that possible. Changing the scenery (moving from my apartment to a café or from one side of the university library to the other) usually helps me beat writer's block or three-quarter curse.

However, the actual look of the physical workspace has never mattered to me that much. At work, the only real personalization of my desk is coincidental and functional: my big green Boston Globe mug, my Kindle, my notebook of daily to-do lists, all scattered around at random. The computer however, has to feel right, and the process of logging on to everything in the "right" order and arranging the programs I work with in their "right" places on my screens has become a routine I won't mess with.

A friend who trained to be a chef in France taught me the importance of mise en place, literally "putting in place" your ingredients and tools before getting to work. The phrase comes from French kitchens, but setting up your workspace matters, whether you're chopping onions, sharpening pencils or upgrading Firefox add-ons.

Related post: Multi-tasking and concentration

Desk - Music and Sound Design from Aaron Trinder Film:Motion:Music on Vimeo.

Posted by Julie at 4:29 PM | TrackBack

September 6, 2010

Overheard in the newsroom

I love Overheard in the Newsroom. Deeply. Here are a few favorites:

Reporter: “When I’m plagiarized by the competition, I’ll know I finally made it.” (I've made it. )

Copy chief: “You know that there are no points for making the headline more interesting than the story, right?” (What? But that's my job description!)

Managing editor to reporter who keeps asking questions: “The internet is RIGHT THERE.” (I both love and hate it when co-workers ask me before they ask Google. I send links like this a lot.)

Editor: “You’ve done a lot today, pretend like you’re doing something important until you leave.” (This sounds familiar, along the lines of "Julie, go get yourself a cup of coffee, now!")

Five-year-old boy to reporter interviewing people at snow cone stand: “You’re gonna need a bigger notebook if you’re gonna write a whole story.” (Aww... But I am extremely picky about my notebooks. They are just the right size, thank you very much.)

Photographer, while eating cake during budget meeting: “A life without cake is a life that is sad and empty.” (My newsroom seems to follow this philosophy.)

Copy editor: “If I got paid for every comma I fix, I’d be set for life.” (I fix my co-workers' comma- and spelling-mistakes in secret. There, I've said it.)

Illustration via nongenderous

Updated: I found an archive of favorite Overheards that I completely forgot I had saved. Here they are...

News Reporter to colleague: “I don’t believe in anything,” she said, then paused. “I believe in coffee.”

...

J-School student: “Each of these little failures makes me feel more and more like a journalist.”

...

Photographer to Producer: “Our computers are so slow I could drive to Google and get the information faster.”

...

Reporter to Copy Editor: “I’d take the ‘journalism’ out of it and just start looking at jobs.com.”

...

Co-worker to spouse over the phone: “When am I going to be able to come home? Is never a time?”

...

Copy editor: ‘One of these days, we’re all going to snap. They won’t say we’re going postal. They’ll say we’re going journalist.”

...

Reporter: “There’s something wrong when I see ‘Newspaper reporter killed’ in a headline and my first thought is ‘Sweet. Job opening.’ ”

...

City Editor after sneezing: “Goodness, I’m allergic to deadline.”

...

Reporter: “I always tell editors: ‘I can only be in two places at once.’ ”

Posted by Julie at 8:02 PM | TrackBack

September 5, 2010

A finalist in the race of life

Speaking of realizing one's own mortality, I am fascinated by Christopher Hitchens' series of articles about cancer. In part one, he writes:

The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist. (...) I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

In the second part, atheist Hitchens answers those who are praying for him:

The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival. This is a distinctly bizarre way of “living”—lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon—and means that one has to exist even more than usual in a double frame of mind. The same is true, it seems, of those who pray for me. (...) Praying for what? As with many of the Catholics who essentially pray for me to see the light as much as to get better, they were very honest. Salvation was the main point. “We are, to be sure, concerned for your health, too, but that is a very secondary consideration. ‘For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his own soul?’ [Matthew 16:26.]” (...) what if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.

This is an ongoing series, which I will definitely be following.

Related blog posts:

• Six months left (Hitchin (not Hitchens) describes having been given six months left to live)
• If there were only six months left... (how I would spend my last six months)
• Understanding (about religion in general)

Posted by Julie at 11:21 AM | TrackBack

August 29, 2010

Six months left

"In March I found out that I had six months to live," Sarah Hitchin wrote in The Guardian in May 2007. As far as I know, the spring of 2007 was her last.

Strangely enough, I blogged about what I would have done if the spring of 2007 were my last. Back then, I concluded that I would like to continue as if nothing were wrong, meaning that I would be studying, even if there would be no exams: "I would gladly choose the stress of preparing for the future over the stress of not having one".

Sarah's description of her situation is strangely funny, and very down to earth. She didn't feel instantly wise. Three hours after being given six months to live, she was "bored with it" and wanted to drink some wine. The tragedy of leaving her partner behind is described in everyday details: "I must make sure he knows how to turn on the dishwasher before I go."

Just like me, Sarah worried about not having time to see the movies she wanted to: "I find myself thinking, "Oh, I must watch that film before I go", as if I am going away for six months and then I will be back." But of course my worry was hypothetical; hers was very real.

Since writing about my hypothetical death, I've used the idea of "six months left" as a way to check on myself. I've asked myself "Would I quit this job if there were only six months left?" "Would I drop out of school?" "Would I stay friends with these people?" If the answer to "Would I drastically change my life if there were six months left of it?" is "Oh, YES!" then, maybe I should change it, just in case.

And right now, I would stop saving money and use all of it to get my faraway friends to Oslo. I would give more compliments, because telling people they're great is more important than worrying that they will feel weird about it. Beyond that I wouldn't change a thing.

I guess that means I'm happy.

Image source: icanread

Posted by Julie at 4:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 19, 2010

It's (almost) Moose Cap Friday!

Tomorrow is Moose Cap Friday!

In the photo on the right, runway model Patricia van der Vliet demonstrates the Sacred Moose Cap Greeting behind the scenes at the Anna Sui Fall Ready-to-Wear show 2010. I see this as proof that Moose Cap is now high fashion.

From Vogue to my own little magazine: The latest issue of argument, where I've been an editor for the past year, was released just a few days ago. And there is a girl with Moose antlers on the cover.

Believe it or not, this was not my decision. Our cover illustration is artwork by Linda Soh Trengereid. You can see more of her Moose Cap art here.

But what is Moose Cap? It is a sacred tradition that began in the 1200s in the woods of Rondane. Or in the Oslo pub Café Sara one summer night back in 2008. Since then, every third Friday of the month is Moose Cap Friday.

In this interview my friends and I explain Moose Cap to the magazine The Monthly Moose. They have no affiliation with Moose Cap Friday, but since the name was so similar, they decided they needed to do a story about us.

We celebrate with Moose Cap food (Moose meat obviously, but also Moose-shaped pasta), Moose Cap t-shirts (tm), politically incorrect jokes, and well, parties. And somehow, thanks to Moose Cap Magic even the founders of this tradition do not always understand, strange and exciting things tend to happen on Moose Cap Fridays.

Although wearing a t-shirt or Moose Cap is strongly encouraged, the most important thing is to honor the Moose, honor your friends and celebrate.

Oh, and you should join the Facebook group of course.

 

P. S. Moose Cap Magic means you will never be hungover the day after Moose Cap Friday. Seriously. Enjoy.

Posted by Julie at 9:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 9, 2010

Why I'm a journalist

1. "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." - Carl Sagan

2. "Your job is to run around experiencing interesting things and then to tell us about what you learned in a way that makes it extra interesting." (That's how a friend described my job after I suggested we talk about his life for once.)

3. It's amazing how much you can learn just by asking people to tell you. It's unbelievable what you can experience just by asking if you can watch.

4. Journalism is academic research, only efficient.

5. I can be a total nerd about new topics every day.

6. My journalism teachers at Oslo University College told me it's the best profession in the world.

7. Being short and shy can make my job easier. To quote Joan Didion: "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests."

8. "Research", is a great all-purpose excuse for many slightly suspicious activities.

9. "It is just pure, unadulterated therapy. You can never get away from that therapy if it's what you need to stay sane." - Daniel M. Harrison

10. "Few professions let you be as childish - or as evil - as you can be in journalism" - Johann D. Sundberg (my editor)

A work in constant progress, written as an ever-changing answer to Daniel M. Harrison.

Posted by Julie at 9:13 PM | TrackBack

July 26, 2010

The secret city underneath Paris

To go underground and discover what lies buried beneath Paris, read this.

And then I'll tell you why I wanted you to do so...

I read The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock: The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society because it was tweeted by Roger Ebert, so it was probably interesting. I had no idea what to expect, except that it would be about Paris and mysteries. Half way through I realized that I didn't even know if what I was reading was true. Was it journalism with literary influences or a short story meant to read like a feature article? It was published in a literary magazine, so was this fiction or non-fiction? I didn't care. I felt like I was reading a short novel. I wanted it to be a longer novel. I wanted someone to make it into a movie. I was imagining the trailer, with smoke drifting around Parisian street corners as members of a secret society emerge from potholes at 5 in the morning, holding hands. The layers of secrecy and confusion of art and reality reminded me of Siri Hustvedt's parallell universe. The journalist didn't know if the sources could be trusted, and as a reader, I didn't know if I could trust my narrator, but I was happy to go along with it all. I wanted to be tricked into believing that if I had just known the right people or taken the right wrong turn in the metro system, I would have discovered a dark and dusty Narnia. I wanted to believe - not know, believe - that there are people who secretly maintain the city of Paris from within.

"I have reached a dead end. Lanso’s secrets are tantalizing, but I can neither confirm nor deny them. UX’s deepest riddles cannot be Googled. The question I ask is, Do I believe them? And then I ask, Do I want to believe them? And then I know my answer."

Image: Zoriah, Creative Commons

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July 25, 2010

I am a constant gamer

I just started subscribing to the Monday Note, a weekly e-mail newsletter about media and tech business. The first note in my inbox was about me. Or at least people like me, the "digital natives" between 18 and 24 who have more or less grown up online.

A French survey presents our habits. One of the key findings is that we are "constant gamers", modeling our real-life interactions on computer games. We don't trust brands, and see them as the enemy to defeat as we use all available tools to find the best deals online. Some brands, including Apple of course, "have gained access to a unique status of blind trustfulness", but overall we have little respect for authority.

“It mainly results from a generation gap in which management is still in the hands of people who don’t have a clue on how Digital Natives think”, says Edouard Le Marechal, who engineered the survey.

If he means "management is still in the hands of people who rely on surveys to understand how people in their early twenties work", then he is certainly correct.

Here are a few more interesting descriptions of my age group, quoted from Frédéric Filloux, who writes The Monday Note:

• The Digital Native has a problem with authority, but he respects competence.
• Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy.
• The Digital Native does not rely on a single group but on several, each with a different degree of trust. The three concentric circles are : close friends and family as the core, a group of 20 to 30 pals whom they trust, and the “Facebook friends” of 200 or so, which acts as an echo chamber.
• The group (...) will organize the importance, the hierarchy of news elements, it will set the news cycle’s pace.
• Wikipedia: because it is crowd-powered and carries an image of neutrality, it is embraced as trustworthy.

This isn't a survey I would focus on too much - it's just about a hundred or so French kids - but I can identify with the findings I've quoted above. I know many of my friends don't trust "the media", by which they mean major newspapers, but look to Facebook and Wikipedia for information and news about what's really going on. I would switch "Facebook friends of 200 or so" to "Twitter feeds of 600 or so" as my third level group, but I appreciate that someone is finally acknowledging that (duh!) we do know the difference between best friends and friends on Facebook.

• For Norwegian readers, a related post: Generasjon Facebook - endelig en bok om meg

Image via nongenderous

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July 10, 2010

Why I don't want to read anything written for women

HegnarOnline, one of the Norwegian business newssites I don't work for, recently launched a "Women's" section on their site.

No, I don't see the point of a special selection of business and finance news stories specifically for girls. I checked out the women's section of this site, and it made me feel insulted. I don't go to a business/finance news site for fashion tips. Not when it's Fall couture season at style.com. And if a woman is interesting enough to be interviewed by a newspaper, men and women should be reading about her.

Trying to sell me media for women sends me the message that all the other media is for men. So since I'm a girl, I can play around in the women's section of business journalism, reading about hairdressers, sushi restaurants and cosmetics companies. That way, the men can be left alone with their technology, stock markets and of course any stories about men making lots of money. No woman would ever want to read about that.

This doesn't make me feel special. I just feel left out.

I enjoy looking through Vogue, because they write about fashion. Not "stuff women are supposed to like", but fashion, for those who like that. I'll also read The Frisky occasionally. It's a blog marketed toward women, but they have a loyal following of male readers who give their perspectives in the comments, and the writers actively encourage men and women to join the discussion.

Despite claiming otherwise, many for-profit websites written specifically for women, are actually just like traditional women's magazines, writes Emily Gould for Slate:

"Glossies make money by exploiting women's insecurities. The editorial content creates ego-wounds ("Do you smell bad? Why isn't he into you?") that advertisers handily salve by offering up makeup and scented tampons. (...) Instead of mimicking the old directly anxiety-making model—for example, by posting weight-loss tips and photos of impossibly thin models like a traditional women's magazine—Jezebel and the Slate and Salon "lady-blogs" post a critique of a rail-thin model's physique, explaining how her attractiveness hurts women. The end result is the same as the old formula—women's insecurities sell ads."

This just reminds me why I don't want to read anything that's "for women" at all. If no man wants to read it, how can it possibly be good enough for me?

When HegnarOnline quoted a story I wrote today, it was on the boys' front page. Hmmm...

Image: PostSecret

Related posts:

• Feminism?
• Not quite magazines

Posted by Julie at 9:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 7, 2010

Library fantasies

With one exception (the glasses) the photo below could basically be me in my living room. The more books in a room, the happier I am. But lately I've been spending my free time packing my books into boxes. I'm moving soon, and it is highly unlikely that I will have room for my entire library in my next home. Sigh. In between sorting books into labeled cardboard boxes (Books I Absolutely Must Put On Shelf In Smaller Apartment, Books I Will Reluctantly Relocate To Parents' Attic, Utterly Useless PoliSci Textbooks Whose Pages Can Be Used To Wrap Coffee Cups, Books I Stole From Dad Years Ago, Books I Really Should Return To Ex/Acquintance/That Guy/Despicable Creature Who Absolutely Does Not Deserve Them, Books I Should Just Carry Around In Purses Until I've Read Them Again etc.), I've edited a magazine article about BookCrossing. It's by Marit Letnes, will be published in the next issue of argument, and (spoiler!) contains paragraphs like:

"Books are special objects, carriers of culture, not to be thrown away lightly. Destruction of books is often taboo, as if they have a spirit. They are not like other commodities: They should be given, not just sold."

Hardly the right sentences for me to be repeating over and over in my head when I should be thinking about letting go of my books.

So I fantasize about libraries. So does @nongenderous apparently. Her tumblr is full of library pictures. Read/dream on...

I love the feeling of promise that comes with a library.

Aahh... No comment necessary. I could live here.

 

I could live here too, although it is a little too church-like. Who is the monk-like guy above the door? Where is this?

El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, a bookstore in a theater.

Nice. I have no idea where this is either.

 

Neil Gaiman's bookshelves. See more from his collection here.

 

The University of Copenhagen. One should consider the inspirational value of the university library when choosing a university.  (Photo by Bo Madsen, I think)

Oh... wow. Biblioteca Joanina, at the University of Coimbra. Too bad I can't read Portugese. (My own university library wasn't ugly, but I probably should have gone to Copenhagen or Coimbra.)

In the process of moving, this is a more realistic idea of what my library looks like.

(All images via nongenderous. Original locations and photographers are usually lost on tumblr, but if you know where the photos are from, please let me know so I can credit and link appropriately. And visit the libraries of course.)

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July 4, 2010

American links for the 4th of July

It's Independence Day! I don't have any 4th of July traditions that can be transferred to Norway (I doubt there will fireworks or lobster today), but I might buy myself some Ben&Jerry's.

Suggested soundtrack: Scarlet's Walk, Tori Amos' album about America. According to Neil Gaiman: "The CD's about America -- it's a story that's also a journey, that begins in LA and crosses the country, slowly heading east." It's on Spotify. This is also the album with one of Tori Amos' most well-known songs, A Sorta Fairytale, with a weird and wonderful music video.

Suggested reading:

• In an alternate universe, I'm American, in which I wonder what would have happened if I never moved to Norway.
• Reasons I love America - I agree with pretty much everything in this post, from the blog Yes and Yes.
• To Kill A Mockingbird, one of my favorite books, or Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay about it.

Posted by Julie at 3:32 PM | TrackBack

June 6, 2010

Facebook - Should I worry?

As a journalist, should I be particularly worried about Facebook?

So far, I've been pretty relaxed about Facebook. I still stand by what I wrote in May 2007 (Facebook does not change our relationships or social networks; it just makes them visible to others and to ourselves) and what I wrote in September 2007 (if you don't want the world to know about all the stupid stuff you do, just don't do stupid stuff). I still say that Twitter and blogging have changed my lifestyle much more than Facebook.

Even so, I've been following at least some of the seemingly endless Facebook debates for the past few years, and lately, I've been less relaxed.

Facebook has been constantly changing their rules for who sees what on your profile since they started. Today, you can still maintain some degree of control, but given Facebook's track record, we can't really assume that will last.

This is probably not good for people in general, but for me personally, it's not a problem. Again, I'm not worried about people discovering that (gasp!) I drink alcohol or (shock!) attend costume parties or (eek!) have bad hair days. Basically my rule is that no matter how many layers of password protection and "friends only" I can supposedly hide behind, I'm never going to publish anything online that my parents and my boss shouldn't see. And if I ever reach that uncomfortable level of celebrity status where strangers really do care about my bad hair days, I'll have much bigger problems than Facebook.

Copyright is a whole other story. I would like to make a living out of writing. And while I'm nowhere near being a great photographer, selling pictures is often part of selling journalism. Am I crazy to be uploading my own photographs to a site that clearly tells me that anything I give them becomes their property?

I feel horribly pretentious writing this, so let me just clearify: I don't truly believe that snapshots of my friends making Moose antlers with their hands behind their heads will someday be worth any amount of money. I highly doubt that any of the photos I currently have up on Facebook can be considered works of art or good photojournalism.

No wait, actually, some of them are decent. Not fantastic, but definitely publishable. So when I read this week that in Norway, journalists can publish other peoples' Facebook photos to illustrate news stories without asking, I was not happy.

Am I crazy to worry that this could be a slippery slope? Am I going against all my information-wants-to-be-free ideals? If so, is that just part of graduating college and turning into a conservative grown-up?

Or am I just being sensible? I'm not currently using Flickr, but if I were, it would be under an attribution/non-commercial license. I don't need to make money from my work, but I don't want other people to make money from my work without at least giving me some credit. That's why I stopped automatically publishing all my blog posts to Facebook - I want some degree of control, not over who sees what, but who legally owns what. After all, I have no idea what Facebook might do next. On this blog on the other hand, if the privacy policy changes, I will let myself know.

Posted by Julie at 11:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 2, 2010

The best friend contract

I don't know if these are the particular rules I would put in my Best Friend Contract, but they're probably decent guidelines. I get a little worried about promising to keep in touch "constantly" - I imagine 20 daily texts and endless Facebook wall posts. But overall, I think I could sign this with a couple of people, and that's a nice thing. Anyway, when I found this on icanread, I had that thought that I have sometimes: "It might be nice if there were clear-cut rules for how to treat people we care about. I think a lot of conflicts have to do with friends not agreeing on what the rules are."

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May 31, 2010

Geeks vs. nerds

XKCD thinks the distinction between geek and nerd is that a geek is someone unusually into something and nerds are (often awkward) math, science and computer geeks. I guess my own definition is slightly different: Geeks are unusually into things, but identifying as a geek without indicating what this interest is, generally means you understand everything on XKCD. A nerd is kind of like an intellectual or academic geek, whose interests, although not necessarily as obsessive as a geek's, are the kind of interests that would make you "good at school": reading, writing, math, science or really any kind of academic field. I generally feel more nerdy than geeky, because I don't tend to obsess over specifics. But I do realize that having a gut-feeling-based way of distinguishing the two categories probably means I belong in both.

And socially awkward people are dorks. Or just socially awkward people.

Posted by Julie at 2:11 PM | TrackBack

May 28, 2010

No comments for Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry explains why he recently closed comments on his blog:

"I don’t know about you, but my eyes are already trained only to read the top half of a web page these days. Rather as a Victorian would not look below the waist, I do not let my eyes have even a second’s contact with the revolting Have Your Say or Comments section of a BBC site, a YouTube page or any blog or tech forum. The lower half of web pages is very like the lower half of the body — full of all kinds of noxious evil smelling poison. I suppose it has to be expelled somewhere, but you will forgive me for not wanting to be close by when it happens. It is a pity, a real pity, that the furious few pollute the atmosphere and obstruct the pipelines that might otherwise allow the reciprocal possibilities of the world of User Generated Content that Web 2.0 promised all those years ago. Lord knows I don’t want the Comment pages on my site to be filled with nothing but sycophantic agreement and loving worship. The truth is I would like them to be open, honest and free. There are thousands of people with valid and interesting points of disagreement with me on any number of subjects, with objections to Apple, their corporate style, their approach to hardware, firmware and software and their whole philosophy , but they are drowned out by the fundies and the freaks. One hurtful, mean-spirited, vicious or intemperate comment ruins everything. Absolutely everything. You cannot say to someone about to take a bath, ‘it’s only a small turd in there, the rest of the water is crystal clear’ — one turd spoils the whole bath. So I would rather have no comment at all. Call me weak, call me pusillanimous, call me craven, call me anything, only don’t do it here."

Anything Fry writes is an interesting read, and this blog post, about Apple, was no exception. I laughed at the paragraph and wanted to quote it. Copy. Paste.

Then I got a little worried.

Twitterer and self-proclaimed geek Fry is claiming that one stupid blog comment is enough to ruin "absolutely everything". I think internet-based debate and commentary gets enough of a bad rep from technophobes and those people who don't read blogs, without ammunition from Fry. He is blogging and tweeting for 1.5 million followers. He knows that Web 2.0 is far from ruined, even if he personally can't be bothered to moderate right now.

• For more of my thoughts on media and the internet, go to IT and the Internet according to Julie

Posted by Julie at 10:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 19, 2010

Fashion lessons from childhood fiction

1. Don’t be afraid of super high shoes. (Cruella de Vil)
2. It’s not enough just to be pretty. (Jane Eyre)
3. Well-tailored jackets and tiny Victorian-style boots go with everything. (Mary Poppins)
4. There’s no shame in being different, bright jackets are awesome and you really need to stop judging people entirely by their clothing, even though judging people entirely by their clothing leads to completely accurate assumptions. Actually, every single item in your closet would look better surrounded by Parisian scenery... and judging people by their clothing is more accepted in Paris. (Madeline)

Via Jennifer Wright's series Fashion lessons from childhood fiction

Oh, and by the way, some related posts:

• Playing dress-up (how wanting to be a witch influenced my style)
• Dressed for anything (why Parisians judge)
• Style according to Julie (All my posts on clothes and fashion on one page)

(And yes, this was written as procrastination/break in the middle of writing a six page feature article on South African education. Yay, feature writing exams again!)

Posted by Julie at 9:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 6, 2010

South Africa through taxi windows

"So if you're ever feeling down, grab your purse and take a taxi to the darker side of town." - The Wombats

This is a Cape Town minibus taxi. During our first week here, my six Norwegian journalist friends and I referred to this cross between a bus service and a shared taxi service as "the crazy-taxis". If one of us separated from the group, we worried that our lone Norwegian friend would sacrifice their own safety to save 100 rand and hop on a crowded minibus rather than calling a cab. We envisioned speeding and theft, or worse.

On Monday I celebrated World Press Freedom Day by interviewing a teacher at a high school in the township of Khayelitsha - definitely violating guidelines from the South African Department of Education and possibly risking my own safety in the process. I travelled by minibus taxi by myself, and felt safe the whole way. Some time between that first nervous week and yesterday, the white vans making their way between cities and townships have become normal to me. They have also turned into a symbol of the physical and social distance between people in this country.

Yesterday's journey started in Stellenbosch. This ridiculously cozy university town seems to consist solely of oak trees and student-friendly café-bars. Populated mainly by squirrels and undergrads, it feels strangely like a sleepy New England town. Unlike towns in New England, but just like most other South African towns, Stellenbosch has a township, a residential area originally designed specifically for "non-whites" during the apartheid era. Khayamandi seems to creep up on Stellenbosch from through a hole in the surrounding wineries' vines. It's described in Wikipedia as a "suburb". But it's not a leafy, wealthy, calm suburb. It's a township, "originally built to house exclusively black migrant male labourers employed on the farms in the Stellenbosch area".

View Larger Map

My hosts for the week are a group of five European students at the Stellenbosch university. They live in a friendly two-story house, complete with braai, swimming pool and a heavy locked gate, in the Stellenbosch area called Die Boord. Being Norwegian, my friend Tonje and I think nothing of walking 30 minutes to get to the town center's selection of coffee shops and restaurants, where the croissants amandes are just like in France and the hamburgers are just like in the US.

On the way, we are stopped by a woman who says: "I just want to warn you girls. This road is not safe. The guys walk here to get to the train station and the taxi rank. We had a mugging here just this morning."

The woman is white, and "the guys" are black of course. Her statement suggests that for a black guy, mugging a white girl is a routine part of the morning commute. We want to dismiss her as yet another paranoid white South African, or even just a non-Norwegian non-pedestrian, the kind of person who drives to her own mailbox. But she has a concrete example to support her paranoia. We walk anyway. We don't have a car, and Stellenbosch has no metre-based private cabs and no local bus service.

Either because of perceived distance or perceived danger, the white people of Stellenbosch seem to only travel by car. If I ask for directions on foot, they respond with the South African expression of inconvenience and exasperation. "Ach!", they say, "It's so far!" regardless of the actual distance. For longer distances, I have to specify that I don't have my own car - I am a young, poor student staying here for just a few weeks - and people say: "Ach, how will you get here then?"

It's a good question. If I believe the most paranoid of safety warnings, walking or taking the trains is asking to be mugged. People tell me that if I insist on moving around the country without bullet-proof windows, I should at least leave my camera in the hotel safe. This is obviously advice a journalist must ignore. Some of the people I've asked for directions just tell me to avoid townships all together.

Other people give me the opposite advice. I know people who have lived here for years and never had any first-hand experience of crime. Tonje walks alone and takes trains. Many of the people I interview - black and white, in townships and suburbs - tell me to take a minibus taxi to meet them, and don't add any safety warnings to their directions. "You're safer in townships than I am," one young man from Khayelitsha told me, "If you get mugged, the police care."

So one day I took a minibus taxi by myself. I needed to get from central Cape Town to the Site C taxi rank in Khayelitsha to meet the organization Equal Education. The man who gave me directions told me I would be met at the taxi rank, and that although I knew the way, walking alone to the EE headquarters around the corner was out of the question. I don't know if he was seriously worried that I would get mugged, or if he just wanted to make sure it didn't happen on his watch.

I walked through Cape Town central station - about as nice a place as its Oslo counterpart, which isn't saying much. I felt apprehensive, but relieved to not be moving in a group of seven Norwegian students. Knowing that I would be spending 12 rand and 50 cents to get to my destination (instead of 350 rand, the fare quoted to me by the cab drivers I had called the day before), was also a comforting thought. As I scanned the signs at the taxi rank, searching for "Site C", a young man whistled at me and stage-whispered "Nice" in my direction. My guard was up, and I think I flinched. But then I remembered what it was like to travel by metro in Paris. In that supposedly safe city, one man followed me on a journey that involved changing metro trains twice, keeping up a running commentary on my every movement in whispered French. Men on the metro would sit down next to me and inch closer and closer until I stood up and moved to the other side of the train. On street corners, it seemed perfectly normal to hear guys calling out to girls for attention, yelling lines that could be categorized somewhere between flirtation and outright harassment. But I never felt seriously scared in Paris; I was always surrounded by normal people in addition to the metro-harassers.

And here in South Africa, I am always surrounded by normal people too. The people in taxis are normal. They listen to mp3-players, call friends and read newspapers as they commute. They pass their payment for this commute from the back of the van to the driver in front, helping each other get correct change back. Some of them sleep, some of them small-talk. In this carpool system crossing the Cape Flats, I'm the weird one.

Khayelitsha is between Cape Town and Stellenbosch, so I assumed that having taken taxis from Cape Town, I would be able to take taxis from Stellenbosch. Wrong. Officially, Stellenbosch doesn't have a mini-bus taxi service at all. If my sources are correct, the taxi drivers here drive without a taxi registration, and the "taxi rank" is just a parking lot. Officially, these drivers are just giving a few friends and neighbors a ride in their vans. The carpooling system seems to be functioning much like bus service in rural Norway: locals just know where and when the taxis go, and SA-noobs like myself are helpless. Despite my experience with Cape Town taxis, figuring out how to take one from Stellenbosch prompted much use of "ach".

So on Monday, I called a friend of Tonje's, and he proved the general friendliness of South Africans by meeting me, walking me to a traffic circle, waiting for an hour and yelling "KHAYELITSHA?" at a taxi with the correct license plate (starts with CA means it's likely to go back and forth from Khayelitsha; starts with CL means it's likely to stay in the Stellenbosch area).

"Get in, my friend!" yelled the taxi driver, and I was on my way. Although I could barely understand my driver's English, he seemed friendly enough. I find it hard to believe that he may be one of the striking taxi drivers who threw stones at cars and buses just a month ago. I met a girl here who told me her hair was short because she had to have stitches in her head after an angry taxi-driver threw a brick through a bus window. The drivers seem to have earned a bad reputation, but their service is needed in a country where public transport is limited.

"So, do you know Khayelitsha well?" the young man sitting next to me on the way back to Stellenbosch wanted to know.

I told him that I had been to both the Harare and Site C areas, but: "I would probably get lost if I just took a walk here. And then I would so obviously be a tourist, as if I were carrying a big sign saying 'I'm lost and stupid; please rob me.'" The entire bus laughed at this joke. I wondered if it was funny because it was true, or if it was funny because it reflected the stereotypical view tourists have of Khayelitsha.

The first time I met Equal Education, we crammed too many people into a tiny little private car to drive to an event, rather than get a taxi. I was perched on a stranger's lap, my head against the car's ceiling, driving through Site C, when our driver said: "Ok, guys, if the police stop us because we have too many people in here, we'll tell them you were a stupid tourist, walking alone with your big camera around your neck, and we had to rescue you."

I wouldn't be surprised if people from Khayelitsha did just that. Everyone I've met has been helpful: giving me directions, walking with me part of the way, waiting with me so I wouldn't have to stand around waiting for a taxi alone, translating information from Xhosa to English. One woman met another Norwegian and me in Cape Town, walked with us to the station, took a taxi with us into Khayelitsha, walked with us to three different locations, showed us her own house and found us a taxi to take back to the city. In what was perhaps an excessive show of friendliness, one of my helpers suggested we get married.

But even at its best, travelling here without a car is inconvenient. I would get one if I were staying, but I am lucky: I can afford one. For those who can't, the last taxis leave central Cape Town around 9:30 pm, according to a woman who helped me navigate Cape Town central station two weeks ago. That's so early that she can't go to the theater in the city without spending the night there. In the morning, a commute into town can start at 5 to avoid traffic. Our hospital guide got up at 4 to meet us at 7:30.

Some Khayelitsha parents send their children to schools in richer parts of the Cape Town area, spending thousands of rand a year on tuition and hundreds of rand a month on taxi fare. I spoke to a fifteen-year-old girl - the same age as my sister - who gets up at 4 AM to take a taxi to a school in the suburb Claremont. She worries that her cell phone will be stolen on the way home every day.

The layout of central city and distant township was designed to keep people apart, and it still does. Although the journey can be as short as 20 minutes, going from Stellenbosch to Khayelitsha to have dinner or a beer just doesn't seem like an option. I don't know if it ever will be, or if being able to do so will matter.

Equal Education spends a large part of their budget on taxis, transporting school children from their schools to youth groups and other events.When he drove me home after such an event, founding member Joey Hasson explained the South African school system and his organization's transport worries. We parked next to my hostel in the wealthy Tamboerskloof suburb. He said: "If we want to get to a time when black and white doesn't matter, we need a hell of a lot of taxis."

 

All photos taken by me, through the windows of minibus taxis.

Posted by Julie at 7:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 20, 2010

Elgephant? Elemoose? An update from Cape Town

(Belated) Happy Moose Cap Friday from Cape Town!  (What's Moose Cap Friday? The answer is right here!)

The elgephant image is photographed by Tonje Olsrud, my Norwegian friend studying at Stellenbosch University, who came to meet me in Cape Town this weekend. At the Saturday morning market at Woodstock, Cape Town, I ate butternut quiche for breakfast and spent the day trying South African designer dresses, sipping the best espresso I've had on this continent and photographing antlers. I spent most of Friday driving from Cape Town to Cape Point, via penguins, baboons, elands (the closest South Africa gets to Meese) and the Cape of Good Hope.

Today it feels like the weekend was a month ago. Along with six other journalism students, I'm here to write a feature story, not to photograph animals and taste local food. Since the weekend's sightseeing and market-shopping, we've moved to Zebra Crossing Hostel to get cheap beds, free wireless internet and an even shorter walking distance to Long Street, where we mainly buy cell phone airtime and sandwiches. Our fantastic first week and a half of sightseeing is over. This strange new environment is like a cross between a newsroom and summer camp.

This post is dedicated to the fantastic Aina. Happy birthday! Wish you were celebrating it here!

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April 12, 2010

Economists don’t know everything

"The big lesson in economics from Keynes is that we know less than we think we do, and that there is a vast difference between the output of economic models and the actual behaviour of individuals.

"Our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield 10 years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts to little and sometimes to nothing," Keynes wrote. He was unimpressed by the argument that decisions were "the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities".

This, though, is where mainstream economics has ended up. It is possible to construct beautifully precise models if you start from the assumption that rational economic agents with perfect information are operating in free markets that always return to equilibrium. But since none of these assumptions holds true in the real world, this is a classic case of "rubbish in, rubbish out".

Even more worryingly, there has been no room in this view of the world for the heterodox. The prestigious economics journals have been cleansed of all but the purveyors of highly technical algebra. Economic history has been removed from the syllabus, because those who yearn for economics to be a hard science believe the past can teach them nothing. Truly, the lunatics have taken over the asylum."

- From "Rescuing economics from its own crisis" by Larry Elliot in The Guardian

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March 18, 2010

What's your tribe?

Exactitudes is fascinating. Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek have taken on-the-street style photography a step further by collecting photos of people who dress alike. They've given each photo collection, or tribe, a name. And Norwegian D2 asks in this article's title: "What tribe do you belong to?"

In 1999, I looked kind of like these girls. My braces had just come off, but I had the pony-tail and the dark, fitted, denim jacket. In early 2008, I was a girl living in the seventh - literally a member of the filles du septieme tribe. I guess I did look like these girls - on a bad day. That came out kind of harsh. What I mean is, if two Dutch photographers had stopped me on the street while I was wearing jeans, an open cardigan, a plain top and minimal accessories and make-up, it would be the result of an early-morning class rather than a conscious style choice or an attempt to look like I have "the style of a tabloid actress". In late 2008, early 2009, I guess I kind of looked like these girls,only less Asian and with a cheaper bag. And now I don't know.

Which one are you?

(Parts of this is reposted from December 2008, but I rediscovered Exactitudes the other day, realized they had a new website and that I needed to update my links, and then spent a little too much time looking around at the tribes.It's even more fun now that they've added audio commentary.)

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March 4, 2010

I want to live in English

For every language you learn, you live another life. Apparently people who live in Czech say that. I think I want to live in English now.

Most Norwegians understand English, but worldwide practically no one understands Norwegian. This makes Norwegian an inside joke I share with a selection of the people I know.

Growing up, Norwegian was the language I used with the three people who knew me best, the people with whom I barely needed spoken words to communicate with at all. Even though I talked non-stop (still do) in both languages, my parents and my sister could usually understand my face and tone of voice well enough regardless of vocabulary. My mom could tell how happy I was by the way I opened the front door when I came home in the afternoon. So Norwegian was our somewhat unneccessary secret code. American friends thought Norwegian was an angry language, because they only heard it when my parents yelled at me. I preferred English, but my parents insisted I speak Norwegian, because I would need it someday.

These days, communicating in Norwegian is my job. Since moving back to Norway two years ago, I have studied and worked in Norwegian full time. I consider both Norwegian and English first languages, meaning I'm completely bilingual.

Despite all that, after giving Norwegian a serious try, I have realized something:

English is just better. I'm better in English. I like other people better in English.

I'm more open and heartfelt and honest in English. Norwegians are so direct it borders on insensitivity, both in culture and in language. We won't tell you to have a nice day unless we ourselves would really feel happier if you did. We won't say "I love you" to people we just like. We won't thank you if we don't feel genuinely grateful. Any expression of sentiment in Norwegian feels like I'm exposing some secret part of my mind, usually only accessible to Norwegians when we're drunk.

In English I'm more polite, although I might come off as relatively rude due to Norwegian bad habits. It feels easier to be sincere and emotional in English without feeling like I'm crossing the line into inappropriate. I'm more outgoing and animated, especially when I meet Americans. If I'm in a room full of Norwegians and one American, I might look like I'm giving the American much more attention, smiling and gesticulating more.

If I swear, it's in Norwegian. If I ever swear in English, I'm just pretending. The one exception is if I say skitt (the Norwegian word for dirt, the sk is pronounced sh) when I really want to swear in secret and I'm in Norway. (Swearing in French doesn't work at all.) This might be because I used to be American, and as a child I had no reason to swear. 

Privately, I think that all the words I know, in English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Khmer, Thai, Italian, Spanish, are all one big vocabulary. Sometimes I can use all my words, sometimes only a few, depending on who I'm talking to. Most of my close friends here in Norway are people who are also fluent in English. I don’t specifically search for bilingual people to befriend, but it’s obvious why it works for us: We have a shared vocabulary, and we often mix up our two languages in conversations.

But despite the fact that most Norwegians speak English, they don't speak the whole English language. English has more words than Norwegian. So I think in English with an occasional Norwegian expression, not vice versa. And when I speak English, the connection between what I think and what I say is less complicated. So in English I'm more honest, more polite and I swear less.

And you know that scene in Love Actually about American girls who love British men because they speak British? I know American girls like that, but it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that English in general - British, American, Australian, Canadian, any version of perfectly pronounced, flawless, this-is-clearly-your-first-language English - works for me. Hearing someone speak English really well just makes me relax. Compared to hearing Norwegians speak English as a second language, it's like hearing a singer with perfect pitch and realizing I've been listening to off-key music for years.

When I go through old notebooks and crumpled-up napkins at the bottom of my purse, I find quotes from novels I've read in English. Paragraphs I had to write down, because they made me shiver a little bit, because they were so well-written. Sometimes they become blog posts. I never feel that way about Norwegian.

Just listen to Stephen Fry talk about anything. Even when he's making fun of the very topic of language, I just love it.

Sure, there are plenty of wonderful things you can say in Norwegian as well. You can say koselig, nydelig, jeg er glad i deg. And as a journalist, I love the intricacies and possibilities of the Norwegian language. But I love the English language more. Half the time when I'm writing in Norwegian, I am quietly wishing that I could write the same text in English.

So what do I do with this? Move? Try to find writing work in English? I don't know.

Image: icanread

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Love in any language

We have different words because we have differents concepts, but sometimes I wonder if we have different concepts because we have different words. This is especially true when it comes to ideas that are hard to define. Take love for example.

Americans say I love you for all sorts of reasons to many different people in their lives. It’s the same verb for loving ice cream and loving the person you’re married to. Norwegians have two completely different ways of expressing love.

We say Jeg er glad i deg to close friends and family. This sentence means more to me than the English I love you normally does, but it's still not that one specific you're-the-one kind of I love you that people make a big deal about saying or not saying. Because for Norwegians that’s a sentence we expect to only say to a very few people during our lives, maybe just one. The Norwegian words for that are almost taboo; even writing them out without a specific person in mind feels wrong. When I was ten, an American wanted to learn how to say I love you in as many languages as possible, but I refused to teach the Norwegian version.

The difference between the two isn't as simple as one being romantic and the other platonic. Jeg er glad i deg can be romantic, only less so. And because Norwegians are more direct in their way of using language than English-speaking people usually are, we don't say Jeg er glad i deg to just anyone. Except for teenagers who (used to? I'm older now) finish texts with the abbreviation GID. But this Norwegian, less scary version of I love you is closer to I am fond of you, which I would barely take as a compliment in English. Glad means happy, just like in English, so I suppose there is an element of Your existence makes me happy. We can also be glad i things, but I seldom use the term for anyone or anything I'm not at least a little bit emotional about. I like (liker) my furniture, but I love (glad i) my apartment.

Even after years and years of living among Americans who use I love you as a general greeting with people they just like, it still feels weird to me. I have to stop myself from flinching when I hear an American finish an angry-sounding phone call to a family member with an angry I love you and I automatically translate it in my head. But speaking two languages fluently gives me twice as many ways to think about everything. There are some feelings I can only express in English and some I can only express in Norwegian, but in my own thoughts, I can sort out my emotions using my whole vocabulary. And I'm glad I can.

...

Inspired by Even in English, A Language Gap, in which Jennifer Percy writes for the New York Times:

"He speaks Serbo-Croatian, German and English. Two languages separate us.

I don’t speak German but I’ve said “ich liebe dich” plenty of times and it never does feel like a contract the way saying “I love you” feels like a contract. He, too, has said ich liebe dich to me. When we first started dating, this should have been a comfort to me, but it wasn’t. German sounded strange and ich liebe dich sounded ugly to my ear compared to “I love you.” It bounced off of me, it didn’t stay, didn’t embed itself like “I love you.”

I once tried saying “volim te” — “I love you” in Serbo-Croatian — and he didn’t respond. I asked if I’d said it right and he said I had. Then he repeated it quietly.

That’s the one, I thought: volim te. That’s the “I love you” that works for me, the one that is honest."

Image: xkcd

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March 2, 2010

Norwegian media - Free, but dependent

I'm spending the first part of this week writing up to ten pages on how the Norwegian government is supposed to afford journalists in the future. Norway subsidizes its media, or should I say part of its media, mainly the media that provides daily news on paper. The media that I think is dying. News sites get no government funding or tax breaks, and the current system of funding provides very little incentive for experimenting with more efficient, modern ways of delivering news.

Writing about this for school means I will probably have to use my own earlier writings as academic references. That makes me feel old and silly, but I have been writing about Norwegian press subsidies for as long as I have been writing journalism at all - which I admit is not that long. My first feature article, back in early 2008, was about the Norwegian system of government-supported journalism. My American journalism professor at The American University of Paris sent me back to Oslo so I could explain to him how Norwegian newspapers could be government-funded and still be an independent fourth estate.

I wrote about how Norwegian journalists considered themselves loyal mouthpieces for politicians up until the 1970s, about the controversy (or should I say controversial lack of controversy in many cases) surrounding the current press subsidy system and about the general Norwegian mentality of trusting the government to provide solutions to everything. After a week of interviewing editors and media experts, I had learned most of the things that would later be on the syllabus of the course for which I'm currently writing an exam.

But I never got around to publishing the article, until now. So here it is, complete with the footnotes I added to further explain Norwegian weirdness to Americans:

Norwegian Media - Free, but dependent (pdf)

Image: Madewell

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February 4, 2010

Wise words from unexpected sources

Let's face it, often when you quote Shakespeare, you enjoy implying that you read Shakespeare. Even if the real source of your Shakespeare quote is Quotes of the Day. But sometimes the quotes that make me think "I hope my younger sister and eventually my kids read this and live by it," come from unexpected sources. Here - from the world of fashion and celebrity websites - are three life lessons:

1.

"I didn't get into this to be a role model. So I'm sorry if I'm influencing your kids in a way that you don't like, but I can't be responsible for their actions." - Taylor Momsen

You are not responsible for the well-being of everyone who looks up to you (especially not if you are a sixteen-year-old celebrity). The people that you look up to may make really stupid decisions. Ultimately, you should be making your choices (and judging other people) action per action, rather than choosing a role model and following them blindly.

2.

"The same 'fashion' magazines that offer advice about pleasing men might decide that fashion isn't for overweight people, but it's Tanya Gold's fault for believing it, and if she really wanted to have fun with clothes she could." - Tavi Gevinson (responding to "Why I hate fashion" by Tanya Gold)

If you don't like the rules, change them instead of refusing to play. Don't let your issues stop you from enjoying life.

3.

"When you do something great and somebody says 'I like that', you should look at them and say: 'Thank you, I worked very hard on it, and I know it's great.'" - Lady Gaga

Be proud of your work. Obviously.

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January 26, 2010

Fur issues, part 3: Organic, fair-trade, free range coats

I'm surprised the Norwegian fur industry hasn't gotten its act together by now.   

Let's examine the evidence:

1. Norway is a rich country, but Norwegians claim to be down to earth and sensible. So Norwegians love politically correct, expensive status symbols.

2. A Norwegian writer recently used this country's winter weather as evidence that God's world-creating talent is grossly overrated. You would think we were willing to buy anything that could keep us warm.

3. Free range meat, eggs and dairy are sold in many Norwegian supermarkets. This indicates that plenty of Norwegians care about animal rights, but are still ok with killing animals so human beings can be happier.

4. Vegan footwear exists. Marketing fashion as politically correct seems to work.

5. I count Norwegian tap water among my favorite drinks. I miss it when I'm outside the country. But selling Norwegian bottled water to people in Norway who own sinks, turned out to be a successful business plan. We will clearly pay money for anything.

In all seriousness, why does the fur industry not attempt to capitalize on the consumer demand for "ethical" luxury?

After a dissapointing fall season for the fur industry, the unusually cold winter has driven Norwegian fur sales up, leading to more debate about animal cruelty. In this VG article, a spokesperson for Pelsinform says fur farmers who mistreat their animals are a far greater threat to the industry than animal rights activists or fur boycotts are. I think that's true.

As I've tried to explain before, killing animals for fur isn't basicly any worse than killing them for meat. But if the fur industry really is crueller than the meat industry, then of course they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

My advice: Make sure the animals are treated well until they die as peacefully and painlessly as possible. And then make sure consumers know about that.

This is Part 3, in which I give the fur industry some marketing advice. You should also read

• Part 1, in which an ethical dilemma turns up literally on my doorstep, in the form of a white rabbit fur vest
• Part 2, in which I make a more serious attempt to discuss fashion as if it were a topic in ethics class.

Photo: .jowo. CreativeCommons

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January 25, 2010

Too busy to write, so I’ll teach you how to read

Long-time readers may know what this picture means: I am literally buried in word-related work. Except now, in 2010, there are fewer books and more computer files to be read, written, edited, sent and uploaded. So the buried part is not so literal anymore.

While I write a news article, a media commentary column, a movie review and a summary of a book chapter, you can read How to win at reading academic articles from the blog An Improbable Fiction.

Like the author of that post, I spent my time at university struggling with the dual burdens of popularity and belief that I could take on extra courses. But I managed, because I can (usually) read and understand things pretty quickly. You can too! There are many, many techniques for doing so, but today, I'm recommending a combination of reading and note-taking described here.

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January 24, 2010

Fur issues part 2: Attempting to make sense

A response to comments on:

• Part 1, in which an ethical dilemma turns up literally on my doorstep, in the form of a white rabbit fur vest.

Eva writes that last week's post about fur didn't address the issue of animal cruelty in the fur industry enough. I actually barely addressed it at all.

That fur is wrong because it hurts animals is the foundation for the whole fur debate. It's the basic assumption underlying all the confusion in my head (which Martine called "witty" in her comment).

However there is the difference between "Fur is wrong because animals die" and "Fur is wrong because the fur industry mistreats animals and then they die".

The first sentence makes logical sense, but I disagree with it. I happen to think that killing animals for food is ok. (I had a tuna sandwich today.) So I have to think that killing animals for clothing is ok. (I wore leather boots while I ate the sandwich.)

The second sentence does not make sense. Animal cruelty is wrong. Fur in itself is not automatically wrong because of this.

I don't know that much about the issue of animal cruelty in the fur industry. Also (and this is actually the important part): I don't know that much about animal cruelty in the meat/fish/egg/dairy industries either, not to mention all the other industries I support each day. And that's why I've worn fur a handful of times. Because being anti-fur would be hypocritical. It would mean arbitrarily "boycotting" something that I have never bought anyway, while continuing to support industries that may or may not be just as bad.

My conclusion in part 1 was that, given that fur is one of the many reasons human beings kills other species, and given my insufficient knowledge of the amount of harm I was inflicting on other living creatures, to be against fur I should also be against meat, fish and leather (definitely, because animals have to die for me to have this), plus silk, eggs, dairy and probably a lot of fruits and vegetables (probably, because animals are very likely to die so that I can have these things). And I don't want to be naked and hungry.

I'm not saying "I simply don't want to care about animals." I'm saying that as long as I'm not a vegan, I have no reason to be against fur in itself. It would be like saying "Minks deserve to live, but fish don't."

Being ok with fur doesn't mean I can't be against specific animal cruelty. And yes, the idea that the fur industry does a lot of cruel things is one of the reasons I have never particularly wanted fur. In part one, I wrote: "I had never seriously considered buying a fur coat in the same way I've never seriously considered buying a pair of Prada pumps or a Burberry trench coat: I don't have that kind of money." However, I have wanted Prada pumps and a Burberry trench coat.

Full disclosure: I have never bought any real fur. I have worn (daily for two seasons) a coat with a fur collar, which my grandmother had worn decades earlier. The collar was supposedly wolf, but I honestly don't know. That coat had a rabbit fur lining, which I removed and never wore. I have also borrowed mink scarves and collars for specific occasions, including a costume party, from family members. The other women in my family wear fur. I was given a rabbit fur vest, which I returned after wearing twice.

Related links:

• Here's a video (Norwegian news clip) about cruelty to chickens. (Norwegian)
• My journalism classmate Jorunn Gaarder wrote a very balanced feature article about the fur debate. It was adapted into a news story and published in the Norwegian newspaper VG, but not online. If you have access to the archive Atekst, you can read the VG article here. (Norwegian)
• Anne Viken, a Norwegian free-lance journalist and veterinarian, has written articles about marketing products as "ethical" and what's really behind labels like "local food" and "organic food". Here's one of them. There are more articles about food on her blog. (Norwegian)
• IFTF is the international organization for fur trade, both farmed and wild fur. Pelsinform is the Norwegian equivalent.

This is Part 2, in which I make a more serious attempt to discuss fashion as if it were a topic in ethics class. Continue to:

• Part 3, in which I give the fur industry some marketing advice.

(Images by The Sartorialist)

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January 18, 2010

Fur issues

I've been thinking about fur lately. It's one of those trains of thought that simply will not go away, as if my mind were saying: "Write this down! Sort this out! Get to the bottom of this!" over and over and over. Especially after my mom showed up at my door with a rabbit fur vest for me.

Rabbit. My mother informed me yesterday that "We don't eat rabbit," because we used to have a live one. But that didn't stop her from buying rabbit fur the week before. And when she gave it to me, we had the following conversation:

"What's this, Mom?"

"It's rabbit."

"It's RABBIT!?"

"It's rabbit!!! :-)" (Yes, you could hear the smiley at the end of her spoken sentence.)

"But Mom, it's rabbit."

"Well, just tell people it's mink."

Now, with a few notable exceptions, I usually think my mom has good taste and style. Plus, the vest fits, it's warm, and I recently added "It's cold outside," to my list of all-purpose excuses. (The list also includes "At least I don't smoke." and "I was living in Lier when I did that.") But since I'm a nerd who sees over-analyzing as a hobby, my brain won't stop internally debating how to feel about this recent addition to my closet. So far, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Wearing fur sends a message. It says: "I'm ok with the fact that what I am wearing used to be alive." But so does wearing leather and silk.

2. In many cases, fur also sends the message: "I spent A LOT of money on something that makes me look box-shaped." (This vest doesn't; the opossum coat my mom tried to make me borrow, does.)

3. Fur is expensive. So is foie gras, another luxury item associated with animal cruelty. "Sacrificing" the things you can't actually afford, is not sacrificing. I'm not going to earn any karma points by pretending that I don't have a car because of the environment. I don't have a car, because I don't need one and I can't afford one. I rarely eat fois gras, because I can only rarely afford it. I had never seriously considered buying a fur coat in the same way I've never seriously considered buying a pair of Prada pumps or a Burberry trench coat: I don't have that kind of money.

4. I've heard people argue that wearing fur, even vintage fur from the 30s, is an indirect support of today's fur industry, because it keeps the look of fur in fashion. These same people suggested wearing realistic-looking faux fur. How does that not keep the fur look in fashion? People who claim to have made up their minds are clearly just as confused as me. "Don't get me started on fur. It makes me so angry," one friend warned when I mentioned my difficult gift. I glanced at her new suede coat and changed the subject.

5.  Faux fur is not as warm. And it either looks nothing like fur or exactly like fur, and I think either one is screapy*. It is simply not an alternative in my opinion.

6. I've worn fur before (right), so I fail already.

7. Ideally, I would know the costs I inflict on the world whenever I choose to consume anything. How happy was the hen who laid these eggs? Exactly how did this turkey die? What are the working conditions of the people who made this cheap t-shirt? Was this imported fruit transported in the best way possible for the environment? Given that I don't know these answers, I am probably making the wrong decisions all the time, leading to uneccessary suffering. Who says that dying to become a fur vest is worse than dying to become Christmas dinner?

After reviewing this evidence, it seemed I had two choices, if I wanted my own actions to make sense. I could wear the fur. Or I could give up a whole bunch of my favorite things: all my boots, my preferred breakfast, my kimono, the only pyjamas I really like, traditional Thanksgiving - did I mention bacon?

So I wore it just long enough to realize a drawback I had forgotten: Rabbits shed their hair. So did my new vest. I will be returning it.

* Screapy: From scary and creepy. Something so stupid and off-putting that it kind of scares you. It's in Urban Dictionary now, but I made it up before I started this blog. I should mention that I was living in Lier at the time.

This is Part 1, in which an ethical dilemma turns up literally on my doorstep, in the form of a white rabbit fur vest. Continue to:

• Part 2, in which I make a more serious attempt to discuss fashion as if it were a topic in ethics class.
• Part 3, in which I give the fur industry some marketing advice.

Posted by Julie at 11:52 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 15, 2010

Book review: The Big Questions

In The Big Questions, Steven E. Landsburg uses math, economics and physics to discuss questions of philosophy, especially morality and ethics.

That sounds a lot more serious than the book turned out to be. In fact, Landsburg ends the book by saying that most of it was written "not to make any particular point but because it seemed to fit and I think it's interesting."

It's a good introduction to some basic econ, math and physics, and to Landsburg's own beliefs and guidelines on life (including the reasoning behind them). Many of the examples and anecdotes were old news to me, because I have already taken courses in math, physics, economics and philosophy. But it's well-written, entertaining and easy to read.

Favorites:

* If more people really and truly believed in the religions they claim to follow, they would behave differently. For example, why don't we have more suicide bombers? Landsburg concludes that hardly anyone is actually religious:

"If religious belief were as widespread as people claim it is, there should be millions upon millions of voluntary martyrs. (...) Believers in hell should commit fewer crimes; believers in heaven should take more risks; believers in one religion should interact in predictable ways with believers in another; believers in God should have a powerful interest in the alternatives. Those implications are testable. I am moderately confident that carefully gathered statistics would refute the hypothesis that religious beliefs are widely or deeply held."

* If you want to write, study something you love and write about it. Do not take writing classes:

"If your writing is murky, it's usually because your thinking is murky, too. The cure for that is not a series of writing exercises; it's to master your subject matter. (...) Prose flows easily when you understand what you're saying. If you're struggling to 'craft' your prose, you're probably confused."

* The Economist's Golden Rule: Don't leave the world worse off than you found it OR Don't spend valuable time and energy in non-productive ways. It follows that you should not steal, counterfeit or be an Olympic athlete:

"If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. (...) But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else."

Right:

 

Wrong:

 

(Cupcake by Kuidaore)

Posted by Julie at 2:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 7, 2010

In need of another vacation

I am exhausted, so I will let another writer update you on my life post-Christmas:

"I do hope the festivities were kind to you, Best Beloveds. I myself spent the duration lying on the sofa and sincerely hoping that someone would shoot me through the forehead. I find there's nothing quite as effective as Christmas for bringing out all those especially rampant viruses – the ones The Body of the self-employed person saves for rapid deployment as soon as a proper holiday is declared. This is, quite simply, revenge upon The Mind for the rest of the year's truncated nights, double-booked evenings, hair-tearing afternoons and rewrite-and-email-haunted mornings."

- AL Kennedy, blogging about writing for The Guardian

To use Kennedy's phrases and capitalization: my Body took a vacation, or should I say, went on strike, as soon as my Mind decided to take time off after handing in The Research Paper.

Since time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it” and I didn't do anything during the holidays, my Mind believes that no time has passed since December 17th. This means that there has been no Christmas vacation.

As a result of this injustice, my Mind is threatening to go on strike. So, if this blog becomes quiet for a few more days than I would like, it's because I have temporarily stopped thinking.

Posted by Julie at 9:31 PM | TrackBack

January 2, 2010

2009 according to Julie

Warning: This is a completely subjective memoir of the year that was. It's written off the top of my head. My head, so it's going to be self-centered.

First the soundtrack:

• YouTube Playlist             
• Spotify playlist

Not necessarily the best songs of the year, but the ones that will remind me of 2009 for years to come. There are plenty of older songs that fit that description too, but these songs were released 2009 or late 2008.

Then my life:

2009 was the first year I was a full-time journalist. That is, I went to journalism school and survived on various part-time jobs as a journalist and editor. I was no longer a receptionist, tour guide or pointe shoe salesgirl. I was a journalist. That's probably a milestone.

If I had been told a year ago that 2009 would lead me to court rooms, a strip club, a pscychologist's office, the make-up and rehearsal rooms of the Norwegian Opera House and more concerts than I've attended during the rest of my life combined, I would not have believed it. While 2009 was happening, I kept thinking "2008 was so much more interesting," but looking back over the past 12 months, a lot happened. Nothing as big as moving to Paris and back again or drinking coke in the Cambodian jungle, but a lot of smaller dramas.

2009 was a year of extremes. I stayed up all night and slept all day, and then I got a job that started at 6 AM. I worked constantly and then spent a month doing nearly nothing. I forgot to eat some days and wanted to do nothing but cook on other days. I have been very sad and very happy this year. I have been very efficient and very lazy. I have been very stressed and very relaxed. I have felt invisible and I have been recognized by strangers. In a way, 2008 was the year things happened, and 2009 was the year when the consequences caught up with me, good and bad. And I finish this year feeling better about everything. I don't think I have been all around happier at the end of a year for as long as I can remember.

Current events:

In the world as in my own life, 2009 was very much about dealing with the consequences of 2008: The financial crisis continued, the same talk of climate change was repeated in Copenhagen, and Obama became president and eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Besides that I will probably remember the riots in Oslo in January. (Or more precisely, I will remember waking up to five missed calls from my very worried mom. I attended the demo on January 8th, then spent the rest of the night in a basement rock pub oblivious to the broken windows and tear gas above me.)

The Khmer Rouge was on trial, but the story was so buried in other stuff that even I forgot to stay up-to-date on what was going on.

In less violent news, e-books kept popping up in both the news I read and the news I wrote. In February I touched a Kindle for the first time. In May my first article at my journalism internship was about the upcoming release of big-screen e-book-readers. And this Christmas, Amazon sold more e-books than paper books.

Meanwhile print media suffered, particularly the Boston Globe. While I studied the dwindling circulation figures on this side of the Atlantic, it seemed friends in Boston could judge the sad state of print media by the number of crying editors each week. But was it really that sad? I optimistically blogged about the future of journalism (English translation below), earning a somewhat unfair reputation as the only Norwegian journalism student who wants to work online.

Everyone talked about Twitter this year. Many of them specifically to tell me that they were not on Twitter and did not see the point. I found Twitter useful. It helped me get a job, find stories to write, discuss stories I was writing and brag about stories I had written. In other words, I used it as a journalism tool. It's hard to explain to sceptics why and in what way I think Twitter means something, but I think it does. (Meanwhile everything you need to know about Facebook is still available right here, and still true.)

One hash tag I ended up using a lot was #krevsvar. It started as an outcry over one court ruling on online privacy. Then it turned into a general campaign to "demand answers" (or krev svar in Norwegian) from my country's politicians about IT politics, particularly piracy vs. privacy. I followed the story through the late spring and summer, and in the fall I attempted to summarize it all for non-IT-geeks.

IT politics ended up mattering very little for Norway's general election this year. Overall, I think we'll remember this election as kind of a boring one, no? I remember being more pumped about Cory Doctorow being in Oslo on the day of the election. Not that I don't care about political debates, but what were we really debating this time around? I argued that our political labels were outdated, coming relatively clean about my own politics in the process. But I still enjoyed the fact that general elections make political geekiness almost universally acceptable conversation. Until one sports-obsessed person pointed out that for every game, soccer fans reach the same level of excitement I get every fourth year when I wait for election results. (If you can relate to that, you might want to check out a soccer blog called The DA. Apparently, I might write for them sometime. How hilarious is that?)

End of the decade:

My earliest memory of the 2000s is my parents dancing. I don't remember the beginning of the 1990s. I talked to some friends who are only like two years older than me, and they mentioned the 90s as their defining decade: Although they have obviously moved on, the fashion, music and general pop culture of the 90s is the norm they started out with. I was only 13 when the new milennium began, and so I don't really feel like I can say anything about the 00s compared to any other time. As far as following culture, politics and fashion, I have really only known this one decade (and I don't even know the name of the new one). Before that, I was a child. But now I feel nearly old, because I find the following thought scary:

Some blog posts I wrote in 2009:

• My problem is simple - I love food
• Reuniting with Leo
• Newspapers die - long live journalists
• Girls aren't stupid, we're just not as lazy as the boys
• The IT news I couldn't be bothered to report on today
• How to be a parent for teenagers
• Cheating with Chanel
• Playing dress-up
• Bounce-back OR Alternatives to Ben&Jerry's OR How to stop yourself from murdering a man OR 11 ways to feel better

Welcome to 2010 everyone!

Image sources: ArtyDandy, ModelsAreSmart and xkcd

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December 17, 2009

Technical difficulties

I am experiencing technical difficulties. Meaning:

• I don't currently share a zip code with my big computer, the one I usually blog from, where I have Spotify, and where all my Christmas countdown drafts are stored.
• The big computer has been getting slow lately, maybe because I have way too much Christmas music saved on the hard drive.
• I went out with friends last night. And then I got up really early to finish The Research Paper. My brain is as slow as my computer.
• I have forced my way through three-quarter curse with an interview I'll be publishing soon, and I need to use what little brain power I have left to put the finishing touches on that.
• Tonight I will be going out again, and then tomorrow I'll be getting up early again. There is no time for sleep at Christmas, when there are post-research-paper parties to attend and rum-flavored desserts to make.

Which is why the Christmas countdown needs to take a break. I will probably still blog most of the Christmas posts I have planned, but I am just not able to follow the schedule right now. It is technically impossible with my current brain and computer situation.

Read and listen to the Christmas count-down up to the 14th + bonus reader suggestions here.

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December 12, 2009

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

We're halfway to Christmas Eve! Maybe it's much too early in the game, but I thought I'd ask you just the same: What are you doing New Year's Eve?

• Etta James - What are you doing New Year's Eve? Spotify

New Year's Eve can be so stressful. While Christmas Eve is all about tradition, New Year's Eve needs to be planned year-by-year. Everyone gets their expectations up, and then dashes them by getting drunk and sentimental. A boring party on any other night is easily forgotten, but a boring New Year's Eve party will be remembered as a major FAIL. And an actual failed party - the kind where more than one guest cries - will somehow manage to make the whole year seem like a FAIL.

The key to a good party is good people. My dream New Year's Eve involves being surrounded by my favorite people - the kind it would be ok to get drunk and sentimental with - and drinking champagne while wearing an awesome outfit. Luckily, that is my actual plan this year, and it has been since January 2nd 2009. I see no way this can go wrong. My expectations are rising day by day. I'm almost more excited about this party than I am about Christmas. I clearly need to calm down, because if this party fails, it will mean that I leave this decade - the first one I can remember in its entirety - with a FAIL.

So here are the rules for a successful New Year's:

1. Make a plan and stick with it. Commit to celebrating New Year's with specific people, and then don't bail on them. Making some elaborate party-hopping plan or improvising four hours before the end of the year will not work out.
2. Drink real champagne before midnight. It's good; don't share it with five drunk strangers in the park just because it's midnight. That's what cheap bubbles are for.
3. Don't drink too many bubbles. And don't drink too much of anything that will make you sleepy, like red wine. Don't start the new year by going to sleep immediately after midnight. New Year's is an excuse for staying up all night.
4. Wear your nicest outfit. No matter what you end up doing, you should look good doing it. There will be so many photos.
5. Make some sort of plan for January 1st that allows for hang-overs, without being completely boring. I prefer waking up in the beginning of a new year thinking "It's time to meet last nights' people, do the dishes and watch a movie" as apposed to "I survived last night and live to see another year. Now what?" Make sure there is food available.

I'm blogging about Christmas music every day until the 24th.

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December 11, 2009

Wonderlaaaand...

Which particular Christmas recording have I listened to more than any other? It just might be this one:

• The Roches - Winter Wonderland (in Brooklynese) Spotify

The reason for this is that popular culture-wise, my parents are like young children. Not that their tastes are childish, but just like toddlers, they will watch or listen to the same thing repeatedly. Growing up, I got the impression that my parents watched Four Weddings and a Funeral every night, and played The Roches' Christmas album We Three Kings on a continuous loop every December. Why do you think we had to impose The Love Actually Rule? Not because of me.

Most of the album is not in Brooklynese, but Winter Wonderland is. I don't think I fully understood that this was a joke until I had already heard the song 50 million times. So many of the live versions of Winter Wonderland that I grew up with (read: my parents' friends singing at Christmas parties) were in variations of Brooklynese or Boston English anyway, so I assumed it was normal.

Around the same time I got the linguistic joke, I realized that Winter Wonderland isn't about Christmas at all. It's about hooking up or romance (interpret as you will) in a cold climate. Something Bostonians, New Yorkers and Norwegians can all relate to, which might be why it's so popular.

More Christmas music according to Julie

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December 9, 2009

Barack Obama, and other awkward party guests

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while you’re still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium.

We can take it as a sign of what a lucky fellow our President is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely counted a bad break for him.

- Hendrick Hertzberg in The New Yorker, October 2009

I'm still a political geek. I stayed up until 1:30 AM watching a documentary on Barack Obama's election campaign last night.

When the Peace Prize was announced, my first reaction was that whoever put my FP Morning Brief together had made a serious journalistic error. But I didn't get all that worked up about silly Norway, thorbjorning the President just so he would pay us a visit. I didn't really get excited about the visit either. Honestly, as long as I don't get to meet someone, there is no practical difference between being separated by the wall of City Hall (+ security) and being separated by the Atlantic Ocean. It was still pretty unlikely that I would run into Barack at the coffee shop.

And so I'm actually surprised at myself by how annoyed I am as Obama cancels event after event here in Oslo. I would like to think that it's the journalist in me fuming at the fact that there will be time for exactly one question from the Norwegian media. But honestly, the journalist and the election geek sides of me are pretty calm compared to my inner party hostess.

It's like when you invite someone to a dinner party, and you kind of get the impression that the invitation is a slightly awkward surprise, but they still accept right away. So you think everything's fine and that all awkwardness can be avoided if you just set a place for them at your table and make a serious effort in the kitchen. Until they show up late, pick at their food and refuse wine, avoid talking with your other guests, keep their eyes and hands on their cell phones and disappear just as the party is about to get going, often effectively killing everyone else's party mood. Wouldn't it have been more polite to just decline the invitation?

“The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. Yes, that is awkward.

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December 2, 2009

Am I really dreaming of a white Christmas?

Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" is generally assumed to be the best selling single of all time. So if I'm going to put together a Christmas-music-themed countdown-to-Christmas blog post series, I should include this classic.

Why though? It's not all that catchy. It borders on sad. I don't actually dislike it, the way I dislike say, "Last Christmas".* It's just that the message seems to be: Christmas was fun once, but now it's not. Or is it about racism? Global warming? It's not bad, but I can't really relate.

So I did some research. Meaning, I looked this up on Wikipedia. And it turns out, Irving Berlin's original version of the song explained why the singer was not experiencing a white Christmas: this takes place in Beverly Hills, in California.

The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.

There's never been such a day
in Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it's December the twenty-fourth,
And I am longing to be up North

That makes so much more sense to me! I spent one Christmas in Sydney, Australia, and it doesn't feel like Christmas when Santa wears shorts.

• Bing Crosby's version Spotify
• Darlene Love's version explains the lack of snow Spotify
• Keane's version is about gloomy gray rainy-weather Christmas in London YouTube

*I really wish "Last Christmas" were called "Last Easter" or "Last Summer" or "Last Weekend" so that it wouldn't be recognized as a "Christmas" hit, and I wouldn't have to hear it every time I go to a coffee shop or enter a store in December.

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December 1, 2009

December!!! (again)

That's a very cute PostSecret, although I can't relate.

My month of Christmas music began just fifteen minutes after the official start of December, as I was leaving a research interview just after midnight. I started with Tori Amos' version of "Have yourself a merry little Christmas." That's one of my favorite Christmas songs, and she's my favorite artist, so I obviously like her version. And it was fitting for a solitary walk to the bus on a quiet Monday night in Oslo.

As I write this, I am listening to her "Midwinter Graces" album for the first time - and I think I love it already, which really shouldn't surprise anyone.

I like starting traditions. Someone suggested to me the other day that I am living a kind of "Groundhog Year", in which I repeat the same actions every twelve months. Not true! But I have decided to do like last year and promise that...

... this blog will be updated every day of December.

Consider it a combined advent and countdown to the end of the decade.

Listen to Tori Amos' "Have yourself a merry little Christmas" on YouTube. "Midwinter Graces" is available on Spotify.

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November 30, 2009

How to tell how stressed you really are

 

 
(See more Funny Graphs)

Not only are my dishes done, but the only thing I want to do these days is prepare food for lots of people. There was the Moose dinner, and Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving the sequel - in which I tried to get rid of leftovers and only succeeded in creating more leftovers. And now I find myself searching for reasons to invite people over for dinner. Or breakfast. Or cake. Or fois gras and champagne! (Stop, Julie, stop.)

Maybe I got used to having my Moose Cap Weekend guests around, maybe it's an early start to that Christmasy feeling, or maybe it's some kind of biological turning-into-a-grown-up-who-magically-enjoys-chores thing.

Or maybe it's that I have a research project to finish by December 17th, and a deadline right now.

Remember last year's "You know you're writing a thesis if..."?

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November 28, 2009

A not-very-brobdingnagian collection of quotes

"I’ve been spending far too much time at the computer over the past week. (…) But at what point does this really become a problem? When you’re walking down the street and wondering what graphics card they’re using to get the resolution so high? When you chant “ctrl+z” under your breath after telling an inappropriate Holocaust joke in front of your Polish and German friends? When you start hovering near power points instead of looking for somewhere that sells a decent cappuccino? (Trust me—you’re not going to find one. It’s Prague.)" - The Large Frog

"Some men set out to climb Mount Everest. Ammon Shea set out to read the Oxford English Dictionary full time, from cover to cover. Or rather covers to covers, his recent job as a furniture mover providing handy preparation for hoisting its 20 hefty volumes. And why did Shea fix his sights on this Brobdingnagian challenge - because it was there? "I have read the OED," he says, "so that you don't have to."" - Amanda Heller, "Short Takes", Boston Globe, August 24, 2008, quoted in the dictionary.com entry for brobdingnagian, word of the day here on accordingtojulie.com on Wednesday.

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This post is not about pants

For a couple of years, I was in a drama group where we all wore black to class. The idea was that we would be in uniform, and that if we put on gloves and masks, we could be invisible on stage. This was back in the late nineties, during the last BSE (Bare-Stomach-Era). Long sweaters and high-waisted pants were impossible to find, and our strict drama teacher was always yelling at us to cover our stomachs because we were going to distract the audience. I was so ridiculously short that the cropped sweaters covered me anyway, but the taller girls opted for thick black tights which could be pulled up over their belly-buttons, and then short turtle-necks. This "outfit" was comfortable and worked under costumes, but looked ridiculous. But we were in our early teens; we felt (and probably were) ridiculous-looking at all times anyway.

I was the youngest and smallest in the class, and slightly in awe of the older girls, even when they were dressed like three-year-olds. So I vividly remember the horror we all experienced when one of the girls forgot what she wasn't wearing, and walked out of class and down to the public library - in just her tights! She came back mortified, telling her horrific tale of wondering why everyone was staring, and then realizing that she wasn't wearing pants! She was essentially wearing ribbed long underwear with attached feet, the kind with two thick seams in the back (and not in a good way).

Now we know that this girl was actually just starting the no-pants trend, which I am still fighting a decade later. I mean, look at this supposedly "fashion" photo, which I can't remember where I found:

I don't like leggings (or jeggings), but this girl has gone beyond that. She is wearing thick ribbed tights. Perhaps the cape-like thing with the printed cigarette-holding hand is actually her skirt? (The other girl looks awkward too, put I'm willing to call her sweater a dress, so she's ok.)

I found this photo lying around in my unfinished blog post drafts. I probably saved it to use as an illustration for a fashion rant. But my brain is in mushy post-Thanksgiving I-love-and-am-thankful-for-everyone mode, so I can't rant. I'll just share another pants-free memory with you...

I was at a club with some friends, when a girl we didn't know came up to us. To my friend - who happens to be an honest person - she said: "Seriously, how do I look?"

The unknown girl was wearing a T-shirt and black tights, the thin nylon kind. The kind that showed off her polka-dotted underpants to everyone at the club. So my friend said: "Since you ask, you kind of look like you forgot your skirt."

The girl looked extremely offended, and said: "I just wondered if I looked tired or not."

Leggings are not pants. Tights are not leggings. That does not mean that tights are pants.

More "Style according to Julie"

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November 25, 2009

Contributing to society before 7AM - and bragging about it

How? Why? I'll tell you later.

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November 22, 2009

Blogging and democracy (fashion edition)

I read a number of fashion/style blogs last week*, but I also read about fashion blogging, because that lets me think about journalism and clothes at the same time.

The New York Times wrote about fashion blogging, commenting on what most of us already know (right?): The journalists and editors who were once gate-keepers of clothing knowledge are now commentators sharing the spotlight with independent bloggers, celebrity twitterers and well, everyone else.

But does this mean anything? Because to quote (and translate) Kristian Landsgård in the next issue of argument (available January 14th for Norwegian readers): "We're exchanging one judge of taste and opinion (the newspaper editor) for another (the pro blogger)".

Landsgård is talking about politics, but it's the same with fashion. Maybe even more so. Because when bloggers are scoring front row seats, backstage passes and free designer clothes, it's hard to see the crucial difference between a blogger and a journalist. Sure, these bloggers may be "ordinary people" in the sense that they have no education in fashion or journalism, but that's hardly a reason to love them, is it?

I obviously cheer for bloggers, but let's not exaggerate this revolution.

The real revolution is not in who is doing the writing, but in the possibilities of online publication itself: speed and details. Sure, I can read a journalist's opinion of a new collection or a front row blogger's opinion, but I love that I can go to Style.com and see photos of every outfit right away and make up my own opinion first.

(In fact, I would like more details, more close-up shots of the bags and shoes, and more info on things like fabric choices, since that can be hard to see on photos. Thanks!)

Oh, by the way:

• Blogging - what's the point?
• Blogging SO 2004, according to WIRED
• Don't shoot the blogger

* And then I realized I had hit some kind of all-time low when I sent an e-mail to my dad specifying that he should wear a purple bow-tie this season.

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November 19, 2009

The three-quarter curse

“I so badly want it to turn out good, but nothing seems sufficient, every sentence is wrung out of me like blood from a stone, and every time I decide on yet another part that I’ll have to leave out, it hurts.” - Hanne Melgård Watkins on her own writing.

Welcome to feature journalism.

The affliction Hanne is going through has been described to me by an experienced writer as “the three-quarter curse”: You are three quarters into being done with an article, and you find yourself hiding under your desk, wondering why you ever wanted to write anything, ever.

EVERY journalist goes through this apparently, and the only consolation is that: You will finish. And it will be worth it. I mean, logically, if writing were not worth the three-quarter curse, there would be no writers, since this happens to everyone. 

P. S. I couldn't bring myself to post this photo, but it does illustrate the point. I would say that I didn't post it because it wasn't CreativeCommons-licensed, but the truth is I'm just terrified of snakes.

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November 16, 2009

The polka-dotted jumpsuit

I can't believe I wore this...

... to a party.

This is my mom in 1991. And this is me, in 2009...

Ugh. 80s parties.

It was fun though. Apparently my outfit distracted people from their conversations because it was just so... 80s. So over-the-top, polka-dotted, shoulder-padded and well, a jumpsuit.

To be fair, jumpsuits are back (Why?!?!). And this one is comfortable. And I like polka-dots. In moderation.

However, there was no moderation in the 80s. Which is kind of the only thing I respect about 80s fashion. It was crazy, but at least it wasn't as boring as 90s fashion. The 80s had bad taste, but the 90s had no taste.

Anyway, thank you Cecilie, for the photos. And thank you mom, for lending me the jumpsuit, shoes and pearl necklace - and for letting me wear whatever I wanted back in 1991.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extra photo, in which I look terrified. Scared of my own outfit:

  

 

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November 14, 2009

This week: Not quite magazines

I have discovered - and begun obsessively reading - a new blog this week: Yes and Yes by Sarah Von.

In one post she laments the stupidity of women's magazines: ("I could really do without another quiz to determine if he's into me (note to self: if you have to take a quiz to find out, the answer is no) or instructions on how to look thin while having sex.").

Sure, I've read that particular complaint before, and the obvious solution is to not read Cosmopolitan. But clearly, there is some part of me that wants to flip through glossy magazines that are not about international politics or the future of the media. I crave a break from all my different brands of geekiness. I always reach for Cosmo, Elle etc. if someone places one in front of me for free - and then I am always, always very disappointed. At best bored, at worst angry.

Luckily, the internet exists. This week I have read, noticed and remembered a lot of things that could very well have been in Cosmo. But if each of them were, they would have been the smartest, funniest thing in there.

Via Maggwire, you can browse articles from over 10 000 different magazines (in English), instead of committing to one or two from the newsstand. You may ask whether this site really gives us anything we didn't already have - the articles were already out there on the net before Maggwire, after all. But this site supposedly remembers your reading habits and makes recommendations accordingly. I say supposedly, because I only just found Maggwire on Thursday. There is an immediate benefit though, much like the one you can get from reading an actual magazine: you might learn things you didn't know you didn't know. I doubt that I would ever have Googled the words that got me to this podcast about newborns' accents. I found that because it was on Maggwire's front page of "popular articles".

While current magazine are turning into websites, photos from past magazines show up in books. For example, you could buy Dogs in Vogue, if you want a collection of fashion photos from Vogue magazine, with dogs. Like the ones in this post.

In general, blogs like Yes and Yes are my slightly funnier, weirder, smarter alternative to paper-based make-up/travel/parties/friends/shoes chit-chat. This week Yes and Yes taught me Five productivity tricks. I especially need to apply trick number one to my life:

"The First 10 Minutes" Trick
When I get home from work, the temptation to kick off my boots, eat a bowl of cereal and sit down in front a Hulu is nearly insurmountable. However! I (try) to force myself to spend the first ten minutes of my time at home doing something productive. Maybe that's paying bills, putting a load of laundry in, catching up on emails or changing the litter box. Regardless of what I do, those first ten minutes of my time away from work set the tone for the rest of my evening, and I find it a lot easier to keep doing stuff if I start off in that mind set.

Another alternative to a "Women's Magazine" is The Frisky. Unlike personal blogs that I read regularly, I probably skip about 5/6 of the posts on this online mag/group blog. But when I need a fifteen minute break from whatever geekiness I'm working on that day, there's always something kinda-interesting-without-being-too-serious on their front page. For example, a list of things that should be illegal. Here's a shorter list with the proposed laws I particularly agree with:

It should be illegal ...

1. ... to wear tights as pants.
2. ... to take longer than five minutes to prepare a drink at Starbucks. 
3. ... to touch a pregnant woman's belly without her permission.
4. ... for men to assume that by virtue of being female you a) want a relationship and b) want it with them.
5. ... for men to wear spandex to yoga class and then proudly show off their boners.
6. ... to call a size 8 (American sizes, so roughly 38 in Norway) woman "plus-size."
7. ... to speak only as a "we" once you're a part of a couple.

I disagree with The Frisky on some legal issues. It should be legal ...

1. ... to talk on your cell phone on public transportation. 
2. ... to wear full makeup and heels to go to brunch on Sunday morning.

The Frisky also alerted me to something someone at at least one of my Halloween parties should have worn: the knife ring. Scary jewellery by Renee Andriole.

I firmly believe that paper is a horrible way to deliver current hard news. And potentially anything paper can do, the internet can do better. But I still think people will be reading magazines for entertainment, photos and timeless articles for a long time. I still buy magazines and subscribe to weeklies. I mean, this post starts with a photo from the July 2009 issue of French Vogue, which I'm glad I bought. I liked it enough to photograph some of the photos, so I would have them when I lost the paper magazine.

Thing is, though, if I'm going to spend money on a stack of pages, they better not be filled with articles I've already read. And seriously, I had read every "Women's Magazine" article by the time I started high school. It's like they're on a loop, and they just add new illustrations. Blogs win.

There are more links and tips in the "This Week" section of According To Julie

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November 13, 2009

Life is interesting

Remember I told you to remind yourself that the world is an interesting place? Watch this.

I found it on Yes and Yes, where the comment was: "Doesn't this make you want to hug life?"

"Inspirational" videos can be so annoying. But as I watched this, with gray November skies outside and my brain going "Coffee... Coffee...", I thought: "Oh yeah, you're right. Everyday life is kind of interesting, isn't it?"

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November 11, 2009

Blogging - What's the point?

I was going to call this "Why you should blog - even if you have no readers", but then again, I do have readers. I mean, my aunt prints out some of my Norwegian-language posts so my grandparents can read them.

Seriously, I know that there are people out there who don't know me at all, but who are still reading, for whatever reason. And I blog for them as much as I blog for my friends. But mainly, I blog for myself.

I've been blogging since June 2005. When I started, people asked me: "Do you have time for this?" and I thought "Time? Blogging isn't time-consuming!" Since then, I've used this site as an (incomplete) digital archive of things I've been thinking about anyway. I think pretty much everything I've put here needed to be written. Rather than bookmarking interesting news articles, writing out the lyrics of a song I obsessed over in a journal (yes, I was once a fourteen-year-old girl) or simply talking about the same thing with every person I met, I could store my thoughts online. And as an added bonus, sometimes someone cared about it.

Continue reading for some examples of why I blog, and what blogging did to me.

I guess the more interesting question is: Why are you reading this?

I have blogged in order to...

• request answers to burning questions like "Why do people care about the Olympics?", "What kind of computer should I buy?", "What should my BA thesis be about?" and "Why should I not move out of the country?"
• rant about people nagging me, bad customer service and Parisian weather - rather than throw a real life fit.
• publish the notes I was taking anyway, to justify being late for class because of Joseph Nye
• remind myself what not to do
• advertise my magazine
• explain my inside jokes
• make those of my friends who should be just a little bit more famous look better online
• kill time at the airport
• keep in touch while living away from home in a different home.
• jot down some thoughts which will now turn into a research project. 
• express my gratitude to friends when I had not quite been able to do so in real life.
• count down the days until Christmas
• procrastinate while studying for PoliSci exams

And sometimes people cared...

• People have often answered the questions - rhetorical or not - that I've posted here, in real life, or by e-mail, even if they didn't comment.
• When I wrote about Steve Jobs' commencement speech in 2005, it led to an article about that speech in one of Norway's main papers.
• After I discussed the need to educate "globalists" in June 2006, I was recruited into the student government.
• My rant on Skeidar got me a free lunch and gift certificate, and the chance to tell this furniture chain how they should be doing business. ("Are you a business school student? Since you think about this so much..." "No. I'm a customer.")
• My musings on politics nearly made someone cry.
• My guide to feeling happier and my thoughts on how I would spend the last six months before I died actually made someone cry.
• This blog post about brain drain started a debate with the writer I was criticizing. This led to an article in the magazine argument, which eventually led to a permanent writing position there, which eventually led to my current job as section editor. This spring, I'll be going to South Africa to report on brain drain issues.
• I published this blog post about rape in the newspaper Aftenposten back in March 2007. Three years later, I met someone at a party who talked about that article. Pretty fun to be able to say: "I wrote that!"
• And then of course, there's the one about the future of journalism.

I didn't plan for these reactions to happen. And while I'm far, far from being the kind of blogger who achieves money or fame from blogging, I can definitely say that blogging has changed my life.

In the winter edition of the Norwegian magazine argument, there will be an article by Kristian Landsgård about political blogging - and it's pointlessness. Kristian has been using his blog to test out ideas and thoughts that may or may not end up in his magazine article. And as we were discussing his work, we couldn't escape the irony: a political blogger arguing that political blogging is pointless? So why is he doing it? And this got me thinking about what the point of www.accordingtojulie.com really is.

So that's why I'm still blogging. Why are you still reading?

Posted by Julie at 3:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Somewhere in the hills of Ireland is a Prada bag

I wanted to add a Youtube clip of the Tori Amos song Ode to my clothes to my post about what clothes I want to hand down to someone in the future. And then I came across a video of an elementary school chorus performing the song.

I love the idea of a school teacher teaching kids the lyrics to a rare Tori track. And then I found out that these kids actually know plenty of Tori songs. Awww...

nobody knows things like my clothes
my telephone-life in the back of my jeans
nobody knows how I feel today

Posted by Julie at 12:33 PM | TrackBack

November 8, 2009

Hand-me-downs

What from your closet will you pass down to your daughter?

This is a dress which I think my grandmother made for herself in the early 60s. I actually don't know the story of this dress, but it was definitely hand-made, and I found it in the attic of my grandparents' house. It's modeled by my little sister here, in my kitchen which is probably as old as the dress. You can just glimpse the hand-me-down coffee cups on top of the espresso machine in the background.

Although the kitchen is due for some updating, I really hope the dress survives the parties I'm taking it to these days, so that I can show it to my daughter/niece/much younger friend sometime in the future. I think it's interesting how this dress just might work for the next generation, while my modern mass-produced clothes can barely stay together for a few seasons.

Given how much I enjoy my red, white and blue vintage dress, I hope some future girl will enjoy some of my favorite stuff. I'm generally careful with my clothes and accessories, so chances are good that someone will be able to wear them - or at least look at them and shake their heads over "2000s fashion" - years from now. I really hope my daughter likes...

 

... the dress my mom made for me this summer.

... skirts my mom made for me, like this one. I would hand down the top too, but I have almost worn it to death already, so that's not an option.

... my white jean strapless dress from French Connection, which I want to wear all the time these days - and my recipe for cookies.

... my bunad. My favorite outfit of all.

 

... my t-strap dancing shoes, my pearls, my grandmother's bracelet - and possibly my mother's lacy skirt and mink shawl, although they might get handed down to one of my nieces.

 

.... my polka-dotted skirt and my white trench coat, if they survive.

I've already saved my Miss Sixty jeans from junior high for this very purpose. Everyone had the same jeans back then, so they really tell the story of being fifteen in Lier in the very early 2000s. I've also saved the grey corduroy jeans I added lace and navy-blue stitching to a couple of years after the Miss Sixty's. I wish I still had my jean jacket with the embroidered butterfly "shoulder tattoo" from early high school, but I left that on a bus stop. I still have my bright pink jean jacket though. And there are white Buffalo platforms in my mom's closet - a fashion crime which must be shown to future generations. If we don't know history, we are doomed to repeat it. For the same reasons, I am saving that polka-dotted jumpsuit my mom wore in 1991. After all, I'm glad she's kept it so far.

Posted by Julie at 3:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 7, 2009

Bounce-Back

OR Alternatives to Ben&Jerry's OR How to stop yourself from murdering a man OR 11 ways to feel better

Remember that "traditional box of post-break-up Ben&Jerry's" I mentioned? Don't do that. Here is a list of things you can do that actually help if you want to feel better.

By the way, I'm deliberately posting this at a time when I don't need to follow my own advice: I am just really happy, with or without the tips below. But I have been editing this post for a long time, and everything on this list has been tested.

Listen to the right music. If you're like me, having the wrong song play in shuffle mode when you're already feeling bad can ruin your evening. Have your own version of a joyous playlist ready. The songs on the list should not remind you of whatever the Problem is, and they should probably not be happy love songs. In fact, you might want to include something really angry in there, just to get those feelings out of your system. It's kind of like when you have a song going through your head, and the only way to get it out is to actually listen to it. Alternatively, listen to something you've never heard before, either without lyrics or with lyrics you can't understand.

Curl your hair. If your hair is straight, use velcro rollers in damp hair with mousse and really strong styling spray (or L'Oreal StudioLine Indestructable Gel with so-called "Style Memorizing Effect For Bounce-Back Style"). Wear the rollers while you follow one of the next tips on the list, and then take them out to look like this:

Actually, this picture was taken the morning after I used velcro rollers. Bounce-back style indeed.

I find it hard not to smile when I look like this. I don't know if straightening your natural curls will have the same effect, but maybe it's just the drastic change. And it's not as cliché as cutting your hair short, like girls who desperately need a change always do in the movies.

Watch Hard Candy. A man brings an under-age girl he met in a chat room, back to his apartment and has a few drinks with her. He then wakes up to find that she's drugged him and now he's tied to a table, naked from the waist down except for a bag of ice, and she's standing over him saying she wants to do some "preventive maintenance". The plot can also be summed up by this photo. Important: if you're a guy, don't watch this. It is Not Safe For Life.

If you're not THAT angry, and you'd rather just laugh, watch Hot Fuzz. It is really, really, really, really funny. As in I laugh hysterically every time I see it. And added bonus: the only couple who are happily in love are decapitated. (I don't condone violence BTW. When someone stamped on my foot on purpose in a club, while wearing stilettoes, I hid in a coat room rather than punch her. And three minutes of No Country for Old Men left me rubbing my throat for about a week to check if I was still breathing and not being strangled by the chain between someone's handcuffs. But this is a good time for a violent revenge fantasy. Just make sure your visual entertainment is violent, NOT your real-life actions.)

Plan a party. Everyone says keep busy, and this is a good way to do so. Plus, it gives you a reason to clean your apartment, wear something that makes you look amazing and surround yourself with friends. Which brings me to the next tip:

Surround yourself with people who know you're amazing. It's an obvious one, but it should be on the list. Make sure you have a few allies in this party-planning process. People who know that you can't handle negative stress or not having enough guests. People who will not ask you where your date is or randomly not show up or leave laughably early to go home with their boyfriends. If you have pets or younger siblings who look up to you, hang out with them more than usual. Little creatures who think you invented being awesome are exactly what you need right now.

Make new friends superficial coffee-drinking buddies. The best part about these new people is that when they ask you how you're doing, they don't want an honest, detailed answer. Find a brand new acquaintance who thinks your life is perfect. Force yourself to keep up that illusion for as long as you can. It's not fake, it's therapy: Smiling and focusing on the positive is good for you. You can always share your deep, dark secrets when you've known them for a few months.

Dress really, really well. At times like this, you should at least make sure you look great. Dress up just a little more than necessary for any occasion. Enjoy the compliments. Notice the stares. (Also, there is always designer lingerie on sale somewhere. This is the right time to buy some. The Problem has no idea what he's missing.) If you feel ugly, follow these tips.

Be rude. If you're angry, be angry. If you're sad, be sad. How upset you are is up to you. It is not up to anyone else, or to any unwritten rules. You can (and should) pretend to be ok some of the time, for your own sake, to distract yourself. But don't officially tell people who are supposed to care that you're ok until you are. Because they will believe you too soon. And never, ever pretend to be ok for the sake of the person or people who hurt you. Forgive them for your own sake, not for theirs.

Go to concerts. And to the movies, and the opera, and the theater and restaurants. Experience! Remind yourself that the world is an interesting place to be.

Flee the country. Ideally, if you're the right age, go to Ufton. You'll be surrounded by cheerful, British theater people who hug you. A lot. And you'll learn new things and make new friends and one day, you'll just realize you're over him. At least, in my experience. But seriously, travel. It could be a long weekend visiting a friend who lives an hour away by train or actually moving to another continent. I don't think I've ever regretted going somewhere else.  

If none of these work, and it's been longer than say, a month, go to your doctor. Life is not supposed to be this hard.

P.S. If a break-up is the issue, there are more specific tips for that here.

Posted by Julie at 5:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 16, 2009

Moose Cap Friday

It's Friday! Moose Cap Friday! Happy Moose Cap Friday!

Huh? I've been wishing you all happy Moose Cap Friday for months now, and if you don't know me in real life, that must be confusing. If you care. (You should.)

Moose Cap is a monthly tradition which my friends and I have been celebrating since July 16th 2008. The third Friday of every month is Moose Cap Friday, a cause for celebration. If we host big parties, we try to plan them on Moose Cap Friday, because that Friday is already reserved for friends and parties. If I haven't been able to meet Aina on Moose Cap, we've at least sent each other self-portraits where we do the Moose Cap greeting. And on the sixteenth day of the seventh month, we got together and ate a great Moose dinner - even though July is not Moose season for other Norwegians.

I have friends who think this tradition is annoying. Ok, other peoples' inside jokes can be a pain. That's why I'm re-publishing an interview of the founders of Moose Cap (that would be Aina, Eivind and myself). It's not an inside joke - it's a serious tradition. Spread the word, spread the tradition, and as we say in the interview: "honor the Moose, honor your friends and celebrate."

...

THE MOOSE CAP DAY - by Hanne Melgård Watkins

Originally published in the September 2009 issue of The Monthly Moose:

The Moose. National animal of Norway, and the emblem of the monthly magazine you now have between your hands. These diverse areas are not the only two in which the moose is in use: If you like mooses (meese?), the list of possible paraphernalia is as good as endless. The humble moose is depicted on everything from underwear to postcards; there’s moose sausage and moose –skin vests; moose-branded brandy and antlers to be bought for walls and mantelpieces. Given that the antlers are a moose’s most striking feature, it is not surprising that among the many moose souvenirs available the Moose Cap is perhaps the most popular. Did you know, though, that there exists a separate tradition for the Moose Cap? A tradition not based on selling funny headwear to tourists, but instead on respecting an ancient time when the moose was a highly esteemed animal here in Norway, imbued with magical properties? Our Monthly Moose reporter Hanne M. Watkins contacted the co-founders of this tradition here in Oslo:  Julie R. Andersen, Aina Skjønnsfjell and Eivind Blackstad Hackett.

 

Could you tell us briefly how this tradition came about?

The story of Moose Cap Friday began in the 13th century,  when a community in Rondane considered Meese to be sacred animals. For these people, the punishment for killing a Moose was death. One day, Lars and Jon were hunting in the woods and Lars accidentally killed a Moose. This was obviously a tragedy for the two friends, but Jon came up with a brilliant plan. He removed the antlers on the dead Moose and placed them on his own head, thus creating the first Moose Cap. He said: "The sacred Moose did not die. I was killed - tragically - but the Moose took my place." Since the people believed - rightly so - that the Moose had infinite powers, it made sense to them that this Moose could take Jon's place in the community and speak the language. Today we celebrate Jon's genius idea, and the powers of the Moose, both represented by the Moose Cap.

And does this mean you have to wear a Moose Cap every day?

No! Moose Cap Friday is every third Friday of every month, and that is when we celebrate. While not required, it is however, strongly encouraged to wear a Moose Cap or other paraphernalia, such as for example the Moose Shirt (tm) during this celebration. Still, the most important thing is to honor the Moose, honor your friends and celebrate.

How do you follow the Moose on other days?

There's the Moose Cap greeting - making Moose antlers with your hands. In the name of good fun, it is common for followers to share the belief that any topic could be subject to comedy and jokes. So we encourage a certain degree of un-pc-ness. The Moose is not an uptight animal, so why should we be? Also, on the 16th day of the seventh month we eat Moose. This is the greatest annual celebration for followers of the Moose. We ourselves discovered the powers of the Moose for the first time on July 16th 2008, at Café Sara.

Eat moose? What about the capital punishment?

The tradition has evolved. There is always the matter of ingesting the awesome power of Moose. We are working on a new "I can't believe it's not Moose" for vegetarians, and Moose-shaped pasta from IKEA is a great alternative or side dish. However, being vegetarian is so politically correct. The straight-up truth is that it Moose tastes f***ing awesome.

So just to recap (haha), when does this mean the next Moose Cap Friday is?

September 18th 2009. And the next one after that is October 16th.

Thank you for sharing this special story with us!

Now that you’ve read about this little known but important tradition of Norway, let all your friends know! Then you can go forth and acquire Moose Caps together, thus carrying the tradition onwards into the future. Hope to see you next Moose Cap Friday, wearing your antlers high and proud!

...

Posted by Julie at 9:11 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 15, 2009

Exams make me feel like this...

This is Giselle (played by Christine Thomassen) dying on stage at the Oslo Opera House. The last show was tonight, and I was lucky enough to see it twice: Once from the audience, once from backstage. I'm writing a story on professional ballet for my feature journalism class, and I obviously had a great time researching it. Now that it's almost time to turn it in (along with a paper on New Journalism and New New Journalism), I kind of feel the way Giselle looks in this photo.

It's nothing serious, just a lack of concentration and a weird mix of too much inspiration and not enough inspiration at once. You know how sometimes, no matter how many times you edit a sentence, it just doesn't capture what you're trying to say? I feel like that, but with a whole feature story.

However, tomorrow at 11 AM it will all be over. And then it will be Moose Cap Friday. And I thought I would celebrate by explaining what that means.

Tomorrow.

For now, a few more photos from the ballet story...

The Norwegian National Ballet

Cristiane Sá & Christopher Kettner

Pas de deux by Valentino Zucchetti & Chihiro Nomura

(All photos by Julie R. Andersen)

Posted by Julie at 9:48 PM | TrackBack

October 13, 2009

Playing dress-up

If I could have a second skin, I'd probably dress up in you. - Belle & Sebastian

"When did you become like this?" My mom asks me. She is referring to a series of photos like the one below, taken by Hanne Melgård Watkins on our hiking (er... walking and wine-drinking) weekend trip.

"Just look at the way you're walking," my mother says, "In your head, you're obviously wearing a skirt and heels. When did you turn into a skirt-and-heels girl?"

She's right about the way I walk. But she should know that I've always been "like this", at least since age three.

I've spent my whole life dressing up in my head. My outfits have always been costumes, even when no one else can see them - like in that photo.

My earliest style choice was that since I was a princess, it would be completely inappropriate for me to wear jeans to day care. I had never seen a princess wearing jeans, and I firmly believed that I should stick with tradition.

Then my grandmother explained to me that I wasn't a princess, because my parents were not royal.

This was quite devastating, but after a short identity crisis and a very scary trip to Salem, I realized that I must be a witch.

And if I was going to be a witch, I was going to be Angelica Huston (left) in Witches. I was terrified of her. Not when she turned into the High Witch - that was just a mask, duh! - but when she was undercover evil, like this.

Since black clothing for four-year-olds was hard to find in 1990, my mother helped me dye some of my outfits. And add silver paint. I guess you could say I went through the goth phase early. If I hadn't gotten that out of my system pre-kindergarten, I might look like this every day now:

While I was playing witch, my mother had just miraculously survived the 70s and 80s (she wore a polka-dotted, shoulder-padded jumpsuit). She basically let me wear whatever I wanted in the 90s (including an apron and a veil for, say, grocery shopping), within the limits of my family's student budget and my life style. My life style was supposed to involve sand boxes and finger paint, but I refused to conform. Still, my outfits had to allow for a certain degree of messiness, so my mother insisted on sensible shoes. Here's where I stopped wearing dresses and skirts for a while. The skirts with sneakers look was not OK. I explained this to my mom - and started wearing pants.

My mother sent me to drama class, so I could wear costumes in a more appropriate setting. At age five, the youngest actors were supposed to play monsters. I hesitated - evil was a good role for me, ugly and furry not so much. Since the five-year-olds had a lot of creative control over their own performance, I decided to be the princess of the monsters, meaning I would wear a dress and rule over all the ugly, furry kids.

And so I began my acting career, which I now remember as a series of characters that I got really into. I was the kind of annoying drama class child who stays in character during intermission and all the way home. And the more spectacular the costume, the better. If I was playing a girl from the country, I designed a cowgirl-inspired skirt and vest. Playing the woman who faints when Dr. Jekyll turns into a monster was an excuse to alter an old cocktail dress to fit a little girl, and then add feathers and pearls and heaps of costume jewellery.

My mom's love of sewing, knitting and jewellery-making was fantastic for me. I didn't realize until later that not all the parents could make butterfly wings and dove's wings, let alone understand that there was a difference, and that a little girl needed to have both of these outfits in her wardrobe. Even now, I need to give my mom credit for coming up with most of my theme party outfits, including what will probably be my 2009 Halloween costume (plus she made me a maid of honor dress I love and want to wear all the time).

But I was never a princess for Halloween. I never had a pink phase. I stopped being a princess when I was four and faced the reality of being the daughter of a business school student, not a king.

And years later, when I worked at the ballet supply store LaDanse, my favorite customers were the little girls who specifically asked for black ballet shoes. I think I'm still more drawn to the dark, mysterious villainwear, rather than the pastel princess costumes. But I have accepted that people will insist on seeing me as "sweet" anyway. I don't think I can look provocative in any way if I try.

Helen Gorden writes in The Guardian that "a lot of dressing up takes place inside the head and not in front of the mirror; choosing a new outfit is about the associations it provokes as well as the way it looks." That is so true.

Even at age four, I knew I couldn't pull off evil the way Angelica Huston could. And I'm not going to try now either. But somehow, the idea of dressing up as a witch to go to kindergarten eventually translated into little black dresses and red lipstick - and no desire to be blond or tan.

And even now, sometimes it helps to step out of my apartment knowing that I'm actually an undercover grand high witch.

 

I love acting. It is so much more real than life. - Oscar Wilde

By the way, more posts about the childhood version of Julie:

• In an alternate universe, I'm American 
• You know I can't handle stupidity (about my early vampire days)
• Remembering October 2001 
• Books I read too early

Posted by Julie at 9:27 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 23, 2009

Deadlines and drama

My life has been crazy these past couple of weeks. "Deadlines and drama" - that basically says it all. I have told people "I'll call you next time I have five minutes", and then literally not had five minutes for days. Which is why I haven't updated.

I have been writing a lot, but for school and argument, not for the blog. In fact, even some of my blogging was not actually blogging. My Norwegian rambling about wanting to go back to college was a school assignment which will be published in argument.

In the New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd writes that "Blue is the new black". Apparently, women all around the world are getting sadder. We're all "in a funk" to use her expression. Unfortunately, I think she's right about this: Being a young woman can be really, really difficult sometimes.

Not that I think being a man would be all that easy either. In fact, many of my friends seem to have been in some kind of funk lately, but maybe for us it's more about being at that age where our decisions are more important than before. Hard work for little or no cash combined with concerns about what to do with the future - that's life for me and most of my friends. Lately, I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I'm supposed to do with the next part of my life, now that journalism school will be over soon. And that constant feeling of "I should really be working towards my "next big thing" right now" isn't all that up-lifting.

Despite it all, I know I'm happy these days. Because when I'm walking home from school, listening to Camera Obscura's "French Navy", and I have to stop myself from dancing, I know life is basically good.

Posted by Julie at 8:26 PM | TrackBack

September 9, 2009

My sister's confirmation - and some thoughts on photography

When I learned to write, I stopped drawing. I was clearly never interested in creating art; I just wanted to tell stories. Communicating through written words was so much more efficient than creating images.

I've found out that my single favorite thing about my new camera is that I can show people what I'm seeing, not a washed-out copy of what was there a few seconds after I saw something interesting. When technology works, it removes all the excuses. With a faster, more adjustable camera, the only thing left to worry about is finding something to show people.

And while I'm nowhere near being a photographer, acting as one for my sister's confirmation a couple of weekends ago was fun. Not only does being the photographer allow you to walk around during long dinners and get the best seats at all times. The dramatic traditional Norwegian dresses and the soft light from all the pink candles were a challenge to get right - and good practice.

Confirmations are a big deal in Norway, beyond the religious aspect. Traditionally, the ceremony marks the start of adulthood. In fact, we have secular confirmation ceremonies simply to celebrate the growing-up aspect, without the actual "confirmation" part. My sister's ceremony was religious. It was also the first time she got to wear her bunad, or traditional Norwegian dress. My mom, my sisters and I all have bunads from Valdres, but my bunad is a different style than theirs.

In the photo above, my sister is chasing after me between the church and our family's house on the next island over from the church. We lost our driver, and I got the chance to take even more photos of her - until she decided she was tired of my paparazzi tendencies and wanted to steal my camera.

 

The Norwegian mafia

My sister, Jenny, right after her ceremony.

She's joined the mafia too.

 

On important days, it's easy to forget how beautiful our neighborhood is.

I have a strange kind of love for this photo. It's just so obvious that my dad made a really terrible suggestion just as I took the picture. My sister is clearly all "Dad, I'm an adult now, and this is my day." My mom is really much prettier than this.

See? Much prettier.

Everything in life should be pink.

 

 

From left to right: Me, my mom, Midi the dog and Jenny.

Posted by Julie at 11:23 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 25, 2009

How to be a parent for teenagers

Ingar sent me a link to an article called "5 steps to understanding teenage girls". I talked to my mom on the phone a couple of days after reading the article, and we talked about her own parent-frustrations.

My mom isn't frustrated about teenage girls. She's frustrated about their parents - specifically the way other parents talk about their teenagers. When my mom claims teenage girls aren't monsters, parents react either with "You don't know what we're going through. Your daughters follow the rules." or "You have no idea what you're talking about. You think your daughters are following the rules? Puh-lease!"

By the time my youngest sister turns 20, my parents will have spent 15 years of their lives being the parents of teenagers. The article from Ingar and my conversation with my mom both got me thinking: What did my parents do right?

First of all, my parents know better than to listen to the worst advice. For example, when there was some newspaper/magazine debate about reading teenagers' diaries and text messages to check on what they were up to, I told my parents that I would never, ever, forgive them if they invaded my privacy that way. I think I was about fifteen, and I kept a very honest journal. Which they better not have read.

(Shortly after this, my dad set up a blog for me, so he could legitimately read some of my thoughts. Pretty sneaky.)

I've been an ex-teenager for a couple of years now. Looking back, I never felt like my parents were ruining my life. We fought, but I never fundamentally thought of them as enemies. In fact, I would say that my parents and I have had more serious disagreements before I turned 13 and after I turned 20 than during those supposedly difficult teenage years. Which brings me to my most basic tip for being a good parent for teenagers: Stop imagining that those seven years are so very different from all the other years of your lives.

I think that by the time your children become teenagers, they should know the following:

• What your general definition of acceptable behavior is.
• That while you will be disappointed if they go against this, you trust them to make their own decisions.
• That in a worst case scenario where they make all the wrong decisions (according to your definitions) and everything blows up in their teenage faces, you will still be their parent, even if you're angry.

Really, that's it. Start the supposedly awful teenage years with mutual trust and half the job is done.

Beyond that, be consistent and predictable when it comes to rules - and within the ground rules, be flexible and reasonable. I usually knew what to expect from my parents. I also feel like my parents communicated the difference between what was really unacceptable and what was just not recommendable. For example, lying about my age and sneaking into clubs was something I got away with. Taking drugs while at those clubs would not have been ok. I've stayed home from school because I didn't feel like going - with my parents' permission. But not caring about school at all, or cheating on a test, would have gone against their values, which I think would have been different.

The point is that I felt we had a shared understanding about what the limit was. Sometimes I went beyond that line, and crossed over into unacceptable, they-better-not-find-out-about-this territory, but I always knew that was what I was doing. I think that kept me in check a bit; it kept me from going too far.

In the comments to the article, "Former Teenager" wrote:

I was pretty wild from 16-18 (sex with older men, smoking, taking ecstasy at weekends in nightclubs and bunking off school whenever I knew I wouldn't get caught) though had the good sense to keep very schtum about it as my parents were quite strict... although I now realise she knew about the majority of it, worried about it and monitored it quite early on and never believed my lies and ommissions.

Her 'talking' about this stuff with me wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to my behaviour but knowing where her tolerance levels were absolutely helped keep me in check. I would never have dared get pregnant, fail an exam, need my stomach pumping or get caught playing truant. As a result I got fabulous A level grades, a good degree from a good university and now have an excellent career and an eminently lovely and sensible man, despite my teenage high spirits.

A bit of wildness does teenagers no harm provided parents are there to set firm objectives, maintain order and pick up the pieces every now and then.

In other words, don't underestimate the power of "My parents will be so disappointed in me." That thought has kept me from doing some pretty stupid stuff.

Throughout my teenage years, I perfected my defense for the day when my parents would be really, really disappointed in me. It varied, but followed this basic idea:

Mom, dad, I'm not pregnant. I've never been arrested, I've never taken illegal drugs, and I don't smoke. I've never committed any serious crimes, and my grades are still good. But please, don't try to make me stop __________. Because I probably will continue to do so anyway. And you should be glad that's all I'm doing.

I never needed to say it.

Usually, the blank was filled with some variation of "going to parties with people who do things you don't want me to do". But as it turns out, my parents trusted me to be able to be in a potentially risky environment without putting myself at risk. (Or they just had no idea what I was really up to, but I'm going to assume my parents are smarter than that.)

The point is that if someone wants to for example start smoking, it's really hard to stop them. I've tried and failed repeatedly. When I wanted my friends and family members to stop smoking, I didn't have the resources parents have with their kids. I couldn't lock them in their room, for example. But locking up children is usually frowned upon, even though that's really the only way to forcefully stop someone from breaking the rules.

Which brings me back to mutual trust and shared understanding of rules: I think my parents knew they couldn't stop me, but they relied on me to stop myself. And that was good for me.

I can just hear the other parents saying: "Yeah, but they're not all goody two-shoes like you,", and I could probably write a whole separate blog post to answer that kind of comment. But any parent who thinks I was born "a nice girl" while their own children are actually impossible, simply does not get it.

The point here is that while "My parents don't want me to do this." may deter some teenagers, it isn't really a genuinely good reason not to do something. You need to teach them why drugs/cheating/lying etc. are bad in the long run. If they want to do something, and they can't see for themselves that it's bad for them, then you can't stop them by force. 

And beyond that, remember that your kids are growing up. That's kind of the whole idea of being teenagers: they are no longer children. More and more of their world is separate from your world, and more and more of their problems have nothing to do with you. The plus side: It might not be your fault. The minus side: It might be completely out of your control.

I'll finish this with another comment from below that same article:

I've always thought that if you expect trouble with teenagers, that's what you get. Too many people batten down the hatches and prepare for war with a giant list of 'Don'ts' before anything's even happened.

It's important to like teenagers... my daughter's nearly a year old and people say 'Ah, but wait til she's a teenager', and you know what? I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm well aware, though, that maybe I was lulled into a false sense of security - there was no door slamming and squawking with the three of us in our teens, but I still don't think we were that exceptional. Our parents trusted us not to do anything stupid, we paid them back by not doing anything (too) stupid, and they didn't make a fuss over things that weren't worth it.

- Claudia Conway

Posted by Julie at 12:35 AM | TrackBack

August 23, 2009

Koselig = the meaning of life

During Julie's* stay in Oslo, and again during a conversation with Peter, the list of "signs you know you've been in Norway too long" came up repeatedly. I finally found a really long version of this list. Some of these are really, really funny, some are pretty disturbing (like the first and last one), and they are all true.

*Julie?!?!? Where am I supposed to link to you?

You know you've been in Norway for too long when...

• ...you start to believe that if it wasn't for Norway's efforts the world would collapse.
• ...you only buy your own drink at the bar even when you are with a group of people.
• ...you can't remember when to say "please" and "excuse me".
• ...you always prepare to catch the closing door if following closely behind somebody.
• ...a stranger on the street smiles at you, you assume that:
  a) he is drunk
  b) insane
  c) American
  d) all of the above
• ...silence is fun.
• ...you use "Mmmm" as conversation filler.
• ...you actually believe that there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
• ...you know Norway's results in the last three years in the "Melodi Grand Prix" song contest (Eurovision Song Contest).
• ...it seems nice to spend a week in a small wooden cottage up in the mountains, with no running water and no electricity.
• ...you know at least five different words for describing different kinds of snow.
• ...an outside temperature of 9 degrees Celsius ( 45F ) is mild in mid June.
• ...you know the difference between Blue and Red ski wax.
• ...you don't fall over when walking on ice.
• ...you associate Friday afternoon with a trip to the Government liquor store.
• ...you think nothing of paying $50 for a bottle of 'cheap' spirits at Vinmonopolet ("the wine monopoly").
• ...it's acceptable to eat lunch at 11.00 and dinner at 15.00.
• ...it no longer seems excessive to spend $100 on drinks one night.
• ...you know that "religious holiday" means "let's get pissed".
• ...you find yourself more interested in the alcohol content than in the name of the wine.
• ...you enjoy the taste of lutefisk (jelly-like, bad-smelling fish) and cod prepared in any way, including fried cod tongues.
• ...you like to wrap your hotdog in a cold pancake.
• ...you associate warm rice porridge with Saturday and Xmas-eve.
• ...you can prepare fish in five different ways without cooking it.
• ...you wear sandals with socks.
• ...your wardrobe no longer has suits, but blue shirts and mustard coloured sportjackets.
• ...you don't look twice at business men in dark suits wearing sport socks.
• ...it feels natural to wear sport clothes and backpack everywhere, including the cinema, bowling alley, and to church.
• ...you find yourself speaking halfway Swedish with Swedes.
• ...you can't understand why foreigners haven't heard about Bjorn Daehlie.
• …you don’t question the habit of always making “matpakke” (sandwich in paper – some sort of lunch packet)
• …you know the meaning of life has something to do with the word “koselig” (cosy)
• …you get scared when a stranger randomly starts up a conversation with you.
• …you can’t stand leaving the country because people everywhere else are so nice, it’s annoying.
• …you look away when you walk by people on the street.
• …you vigorously defend whaling and enjoy consuming whale meat.
• …you have two cars, a cabin and a boat, if not more.
• …you think it's weird if a house isn't wooden.
• …you earn more than you spend.
• …you associate Easter with cross-country skiing with friends and family in the familys mountain cabin.
• …you are shocked if it's not 2 months of snow every year, at least!
• …you can see mountains and the ocean, no matter where you are.
• …you expect all dinner parties and meetings to start precisely on time, if not before.
• …you fall 3 meters, and don't get hurt. If you do, you're not worried at all.
• …you get your hands on Norwegian chocolate and guard it with your life
• …you are more afraid of the Customs than terrorists.
• …you would rather miss your flight than not have enough time to buy the duty free alcohol quota.
• …you order drinks at Gardermonen (Oslo Intl Airport) at 6 am
• ……you say ”oh well, down it goes” when served bad wine.
• …you actually think that fishballs have taste.
• …you barbecue when it’s raining.
• …you have bad conscience if you’re not outside when it’s sunny
• …you get dozy after only two days of sun
• …you go for a swim when it’s only 12 degrees Celsius (53F) in the water and claims that it’s “fresh”
• ...in winter, you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark - while only working eight-hour days.
• ...if there's a terrorist attack on the other side of the world, your first reaction is "oh my god, did any Norwegians get hurt?"

Posted by Julie at 11:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 21, 2009

It's a real live Moose!

 

Happy Moose Cap Friday to everyone!

This photo is from the Skansen Zoo in Stockholm. Julie and I went to Skansen just to see the Moose. A pilgrimage if you will. And after that, the usual comment to anything else we saw (like all the other animals, bakelser at NK and the night train back to Oslo) was: "Well, that was fun, but not everything can be a Moose."

Posted by Julie at 12:07 PM | TrackBack

August 12, 2009

Cheating with Chanel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago, I saw Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky at a closed viewing before the official release date. There were glasses of cava and bottles of number 5. The idea was that we would talk the film up before the release. I didn't feel like writing a review. Partly because of vacation mode, partly because... meh.

I went in on a slight cava buzz, expecting to crave Coco's clothes and to love Igor's music. Check. Check. Also, she apparently had a great house. But that was it.

I would warn of spoilers, but spoilers require a plot.

The full extent of the plot is revealed on the movie poster: Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky have sex. No, it wasn't porn, but that was really what happened. She is rich and admires his work. He moves into her house with his entire family, including wife, so that he can have a quiet place to compose. In a series of scenes that zoom closely in on their two faces, we get that the two main characters are thinking about each other a lot. One night she goes into his room and takes off her dress. And I think: "No! The clothes are the best part of this movie!"

Not that the whole thing isn't all very pretty. I mean, look at the trailer:

But I would prefer a slide show of Chanel clothes set to a Stravinsky soundtrack. The "plot" only makes the two seem selfish and horrible. His wife is in the next room. So are his children.

After reading Lust in Translation last week, I started thinking about this movie again. The author, Pamela Druckerman, an American living in Paris, went to China, South Africa, Japan and Russia among others to research cheating. According to Druckerman, while the cheated spouse is always hurt, no one is more devastated by infidelity than Americans. The French for example don't cheat any more than the Americans, but if it happens, it's not all that surprising to them. Being cheated on in France doesn't change your world view, or make you question everything your cheating partner has ever done. According to Druckerman, both the Russians and the French are calmer than Americans about the whole issue of lying.

I don't know how I'm "supposed" to react to infidelity, since Lust in Translation doesn't have a chapter on Scandinavia. But Stravinsky's Russian wife calmly, but tragically accepts her fate, and she's the one I sympathise with, at least up to a certain point.

I think the audience is supposed to be on Coco and Igor's side, but I certainly wasn't. The interaction between them doesn't justify the cheating to me.  The characters don't seem to be in love or to inspire each others' work or even to like each other all that much.

It's as if the script writers want us to think: If two attractive geniuses spend enough time together, of course they should have an affair. And since the movie is marketed at fans of both the main characters, of course we'll all sympathise with them. Coco is my heroine already, surely she can do no wrong on screen?

Well, my sympathy did swing back to Chanel for a moment when Igor's wife wrote har a letter saying: "I need him more than you do." Maybe that comment hit too close to home for me, too close to the idea that "strong women" can handle anything, so they better not need anything or anyone.

I know that this film is based on a novel which is based on a true story. So it happened, but that doesn't make it believable to me. There is a difference between realistic and believable. But perhaps reality or the novel has an interpretation of events more sympathetic to Chanel and Stravinsky.

Especially Chanel, who as my friend Martine pointed out after the viewing, could be an interesting character to discuss from a feminist point of view: She provides a house for Stravinsky, she is a successful and really sort of bitchy business woman during the story; she initiates the affair. And most importantly to me, she ends it. I wouldn't mind reading this story as a novel where we actually see what's going on inside this woman's head.

In the meantime, listen to this and browse here instead.

Posted by Julie at 11:33 AM | TrackBack

City of Thieves

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.

I was born an insomniac and that's the way I'll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way, longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the head, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good wack to put me down for the night. But that night I didn't have the chance. I stared into the blackness until the blackness blurred into gray, until the ceiling above me began to take form and the light from the east dribbled in through the narrow barred window that existed after all.

Only then did I realize that I still had a German knife strapped to my calf.

That was the end of chapter 2* in City of Thieves by David Benioff. The insomniac is imprisoned in Leningrad during the Nazi siege. His crime was looting a dead German soldier. His punishment was supposed to be death, but instead he is sent on a special mission to find 12 eggs so that a Soviet colonel's daughter can have a traditional wedding cake. In a city where people are willing to eat books - or each other - finding eggs is completely impossible. But it's the only way he can survive.

I read ten chapters of this book last night, so I expect to finish it by Friday. It's fast-paced, sad, scary and somehow funny.

*I have added paragraph breaks.

Posted by Julie at 9:58 AM | TrackBack

June 19, 2009

Thoughts after a fashion show

Despite not feeling all that well, I couldn't miss the fashion show from the graduating class of Esmod Oslo on Wednesday. And I'm glad I was there, since my friend Eivind B. Hackett won three awards, including an internship, money and the opportunity to sell his collection at the Oslo department store Steen&Strøm.

Slideshow from backstage and the runway

After attending a catwalk show in ballerina flats, I understand why catwalk models need to be tall. And wear incredible platform heels. Because catwalks are not always easy to see, unless you arrive early or have some good reason for being in the front row.

Speaking of heels, people who walk in them should know how. I won't judge the models at this particular show, because I know some of them were friends of the designers, and had never walked a runway before. But if you're a Top Model contestant for example, meaning you want to be a model, shouldn't you know how to put one foot in front of the other, even if those feet are on platform heels? It's just a matter of practicing.

Anyway, judging from my very, very limited experience, fashion shows work the way "exclusive" clubs do: It seems the inconvenience of the whole experience is supposed to add to the feeling of luxury and exclusivity. It's so incredibly cool that there isn't anywhere to sit, or even stand comfortably, and that the music is too loud to allow for any form of communication. You feel lucky if you're actually able to see the show over taller peoples' heads and shoulders. And it's really hot - actually, maybe they really do that on purpose so people will wear less clothing.

But despite all that, I loved it! Especially the fact that Eivind won a bunch of awards, which I've already blogged about in Norwegian.

Shoes from Prada, top photos from Fashionising, where you can also see catwalk models fall.

Posted by Julie at 4:06 PM | TrackBack

Hurra for Eivind!

Eivind B. Hackett vant Gullnålen-prisen, VOICE-prisen og Steen & Strøms Magasinpris på Esmods Diplomvisning på onsdag.

Det betyr at han nå er ferdig med moteskole og har vunnet jobb. Han fikk praktikantplass i ett år av Voice, og 10 000 kr av Steen & Strøm. I tillegg skal hans kolleksjon, "Villainwear", selges på Steen & Strøm.

Se bildeserie fra motevisningen og artikkel skrevet av min klassevenninne og Oslostudenten-kollega Linn Husby.

P.S. En liten gratulasjon til modell Melina også, siden hun er min tidligere kollega på LaDanse og siden hun var over gjennomsnittet flink til å gå med høye hæler.

Posted by Julie at 9:02 AM | TrackBack

June 14, 2009

The year the media died

"I was a lonely Mad Ave creative type, with some good ideas and a lot of hype, but I knew the picking was ripe the year the media died."

Digital media from the point of view of a mad man.

"As I watched users generate without ad support to carry the freight, no content like MTV could break consumers' love of free."

Posted by Julie at 9:31 PM | TrackBack