Norwegian lesson, a bit on the late side, or what do you say, Theresa?
delbar, adj. divisible, dividable. Essential word if you ever want to buy a zipper, for example. A zipper which is not “delbar” is useful for cushion-covers and trousers and a lot of other, no doubt highly practical, purposes, however, for a zipper to be useful for jackets it needs to be “delbar”.
There are no people in the UK sharing my name (“There are 0 People with the name Ragnhild Sandlund. That name doesn’t exist. Are you secret service? Don’t hurt me I’ve seen Enemy of the State.”). Odd that. On the other hand, some other people I know also show up as 0, so maybe it’s not all that dependable. (From Joh.)
Voice in my head: Smurfene “Det finn’s en smurf i oss alle” (it’s all Ireen’s fault)
I would just like to state, categorically, once and for all, that I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any distress inflicted on you during the Eurovision final in Riga in May due to the dismal Norwegian contribution. I watched the Norwegian final on Saturday night with Tone (who came for a weekend visit – Yay!), Solveig and Arve and the winning entry was the only one which had a total score of zero in our run-down. The entry we had as number one was somewhere near the bottom of the list once the Norwegian people had had their say (the result being decided via phone polls). It’s somewhat reassuring to be so squarely in the minority, but that does not make the winning entry any less cringe-worthy.
Even if Jostein manages to sing in tune in the international final (his track-record of 1 in 3 times on Saturday does not bode well), I have my doubts for the song’s chances, it being a pretty dreary sort of ballad sung in English with a pretty appalling Norwegian accent.
Never mind. In fact, there is an obvious benefit to doing really badly in the European final, as we are then excluded from participating for a year, leaving me free to revel in the awfulness of the other nations’ entries unbothered by the embarrassment the Norwegian entry normally provokes.
Come to think of it, the ones we cheered for weren’t exactly keeping in tune, either. But at least the song was pretty good, even if the rendition left a bit to be desired.
Voice in my head: Ainslie Henderson – Keep me a Secret, kind of apt, I think. One of the benefits of watching Fame Academy on BBC Prime is that we are getting it a lot later than the Brits. Hence, this song, which has been on my mind since Friday, is already available as a single, which I’ve just ordered from Amazon.
1. What is your favorite type of literature to read (magazine, newspaper, novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)?
Novels and some non-fiction. Also plays, poetry, newspapers, magasines… In fact, pretty much everything. If there is nothing else to read I’ll read teh back of the cereal box or the milk carton.
2. What is your favorite novel?
Ah, now, dear me. Difficult question. In order to give an answer I will say Jane Austen’s Emma, however I reserve my right to change my mind every few seconds.
3. Do you have a favorite poem? (Share it!)
Several. But I’ll pick one:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e.cummings
4. What is one thing you’ve always wanted to read, or wish you had more time to read?
I wish I had more time to read, period. I wish I could read more newspapers without having less time to read books…
5. What are you currently reading?
“The Far Side of the World” Patrick O’Brian
I’m also in the middle of a couple of others (I’m very rarely in the middle of just one book at a time) George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”, Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon” and Bj�rn Ranelid’s “Min son f�ktas mot v�rlden”, to mention a few.
At this rate I’ll have to do another redesign and make the page come out fluffy pink with hearts.
Ok, I will stop obsessing about the possibility of me falling in love. Or, at any rate, I will keep obsessing but try not to write about it constantly and at least intersperse the writings on that subject with some other, less sickly sweet, thoughts.
forelsket, adj. in love, having a crush. The prefix for- is common in Norwegian, you take a verb and add for- in front and hey presto: a brand new verb requiring an object (“� forelske seg”), usable, in the past tense, as an adjective. I’m having problems defining ‘for-‘. Just like with many English prefixes, the word without a prefix either means something else or doesn’t really mean anything much at all. You can be elsket, but it means “loved”, a passive condition rather than an active one. You can be forbauset (surprised), but not “bauset”, come to think of it, you can’t really be “prised” either, can you? Well, I mean, you can, but it’s got a different meaning entirely.
Anyhow, we also have forlovet, which means engaged, the root being pretty obvious, “� love” means “to promise”. Then there’s the next step in the process, but here the prefix disappears and we have gift, married. Due to some entymological mishap, gift also means poison, and forgiftet means poisoned. So we have the well-used pun: “Forelsket, forlovet, forgiftet”. Life’s natural progression.
When I mentioned that thinking about ex-boyfriends would probably ruin my concentration at karate, I hadn’t thought about the possible effect thinking about potential future boyfriends.
My left foot was a good excuse, but forgetting hand-movements is a bit hard to explain away – as is going in completely the wrong direction.
I should probably also have touched wood when I was so smug about not being corrected quite so often as the others. Oh, well. You’ve gotta laugh, really.
There was agreement yesterday that “Gee wiz” is a pretty nifty expression. I thought it would make a good domain name, but suspected I might not be the first to think so. I therefore went serendipity surfing, I would suggest you refrain from following my example, especially if someone else is around to see your screen.
That is all.
Voice in my head: whaserfaces crooning Dream (which the conversation yesterday was prompted by – in case you wondered why anyone should suddenly take to talking about “gee wiz”)
Rereading my previous post, I took to wondering: Are you sitting there wondering “Is she talking about me?” by any chance?
Well, maybe I am. Maybe I am not.
Just for the record: At least three people spring to mind as equally likely candidates – unless you’re inside my head in which case they are all three very unlikely – and you don’t necessarily know each other at all. So though you may wish to juggle any “facts” I mention in order to figure out if I might be talking about you, do not, at this point, take anything for granted. Once I make up my own mind (or think I have made it up) I will let you know, and give you a chance to react whichever way you like. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the friendship I’m offering, please. Roses, candlelit dinners and limousines will be appreciated, but have very little real bearing on the issues at stake here – for now (possibly for ever) all I really want is your company.
I just thought I’d mention it. Whereas having people swooning at my feet is flattering and all to the good, having people assuming that I am swooning at their feet is somewhat less desireable.
Whatever.
Voice in my head: definitely Avril Lavigne now, singing “If I could say what I want to say, I’d say I wanna blow you away, be with you every night. Am I squeezing you too tight?” which is silly, because that is not what I want to say at all.
Typical, isn’t it? Here I am, writing a long entry on why I haven’t been writing much and probably won’t be writing much in the near future and then with no warning I break out all rambly and verbose and feel like carrying on this odd conversation with the sometimes polyphonic but mostly unresponding-like-a-wall entity that is “y’all”. To whom, precisely, am I talking? Do I really want to know? Does it really matter? If it matters, does the fact that it matters actually matter?
I must be coming down with something.
Or is Jane’s RL friend (friend? Enemy? Significant other?) correct, is this not communication? Actually, it is communication. All writing is communication, though a lot of it is the writer communicating with him/herself. This blog, however much it’s me talking to myself, is undisputably also communication with other people. I know for a fact that people read this. In some cases I even know who my readers are. The rest of you: you’re very welcome (though I do like comments…) When I write, I may not write for a specific reader, or rather, the reader I write for is not actually a real-life person but a sort of conglomerate of several, known and unknown, but I am still conscious of the specific readers I know about (not to mention the ones that may drop in as a result of some specific searches). So you could say that some of this is like e-mail, written with a certain person or certain people in mind – or an e-mail to a mailing list, if you will, private and public at the same time. Other parts are more like a message in a bottle, thrown to the winds for whomever happens to pick it up to read.
To be honest (odd phrase, really, it sort of suggests that I have not been honest so far, which is not strictly true), I don’t really care whether this is communication or not. I feel like writing, so I do. Now for the thing I was intending to ramble on about:
I have been contemplating ex-boyfriends and near-but-never-quite-boyfriends lately, and re-analyzing what went wrong with what I thought I was feeling. I have a recurring problem with falling in love with love – when it happens, the person in question is more or less accidental, it could be any decent, available bloke that happens to be around at the time. Which is the problem. Not only do I mess up my own emotional life by convincing myself that I’m feeling more than I really am, but I mess up other people as well. Which is not nice. As I think I’ve mentioned, I tend to end up not liking myself very much for a while. I’ve also lost some (potential) good friends that way, which is definitely not good.
The pertinent question being, obviously, am I doing it again? A: Probably. Q: Am I actually doing the “sensible” thing and concentrating on the friendship part and “see what happens”? A: Unlikely. Q: Will I, again, try to hurry things along a path they were not meant to take? A. In all probablility. Q: Will I over-analyse everything? A. Indubitably. Q: Despite over-analysing, will I still end up in a “what the hell was I thinking?” situation? A: Beyond all reasonable doubt.
Q: Knowing all that, is there anything I can do to behave more sensibly? A: We’ll see…
For all I know it’s an irrelevant point anyway, I think he’s available, but he may not be. He may be married, for all I know. He may be gay (aren’t all the best men gay?). He may be sworn to celibacy. He may just be “friendly, but not interested in that way, you know”. All of which is fine*, really, as long as I don’t embarrass myself completely. I do really mean that bit about needing friends more than boyfriends (or, at least, more friends than boyfriends), you know. If it turns out he’s just really bad at sending signals and he actually detests me, then that’s a pity, too, but there’s hardly anything I can do about it. Could anyone be that bad at sending signals, I wonder?
Voice in my head: Avril something or other – too late to think…
———
*Look, footnotes! What I meant to say “Married” (or equivalent) is fine to a point, it does not exclude friendship, obviously. However, I am not very impressed by people “acting single” if they are not. It is unfair on their partners and it is unfair on the rest of us. So if he turns out to be married it will lower my respect for him, and that might be an obstacle to friendship (I tend to need to respect people).