Keeps insisting on being busy, and then boring, and then busy again.

Not much has happened this week. I’ve been to work, and school. Oh, and I’ve handed in my resignation for my job. It wasn’t working. I mean, I love the job and the kids, it’s just not working in terms of work-load. I need some more flexibility. So instead I’ll be staying on to fill in for people who get ill or go on holiday. That way I will have the option of saying no if it’s inconvenient, and won’t have to attend staff meetings outside of regular working hours.

Other than that, I’ve been trying to write a bit again. Might have something to show for it soon, but for now I’m just doing smutty fanfiction for my own amusement and I have absolutely no intention of sharing any of it here.

I’m attending a jam night tonight. Been going for a while, but last week I had to miss it, coming home from England and everything. But there’s good musicians there, and I’m really enjoying myself singing with them. Last time I was there, I did All Along the Watchtower, and the guy who leads the jam told me that he’d like to hear me sing Great Gig in the Sky, which is just about the biggest compliment anyone could have given me, ever. So that’s what I’m singing tonight. Hope I can pull it off, as I have developed a cold. Oh, well. I think I can still sing.

Physics is going better. I had a sit-down with my stepdad yesterday and had him explain some things to me, and today I had study group and that went quite well, too. We’re nearly done with the hard part, the math part with all the formulae. From now on we’ll mostly be learning history and how to apply what we’ve learned to theory. Much easier.

Edd’s gone back to Japan again. I saw her on Tuesday, at Jen’s. We had dinner and played Zelda. It was nice. Bit sad to see her go, but I think she’ll have a good semester, and she’ll be back after Christmas some time, for a while. Morten and I have ordered plane tickets to see her in the spring, too, which should be full of awesome.

So, yeah… That’s in for now, I’m afraid. Can’t really think of anything else to talk about. Will blog again soon, probably.

I just rented the gown and that ridiculous hood that kept trying to slide off my shoulder, but I paid full price for the hat. So worth it!

Everything leading up to the ceremony was very confusing and strange. I had to go collect my robes at City Campus, and had some lady put them on me, which was sort of weird. Then I had to go register at the Grand Theatre. We had lunch at the City Campus refectory, then back to the theatre again. I kept running into people I knew, but didn’t really know what to say to them as I was mostly just nervous and confused and had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I did talk to some people, though. It was nice to see everyone again.

The ceremony was slightly long, with a lot of speeches. Then they called us up in order of department and the names of our degrees. Pop music was quite late. We were seated alphabetically and called up in that order. If anyone had attained special merits or received an award or something, they said so when they called them up, so when I was called, it was with an added “with first class honours”, which was slightly embarrassing, though I was also pleasantly surprised by how many people applauded me.

After the ceremony we didn’t stick around outside the theatre as long as I should have liked. I wish I had got more pictures taken with people, talked to some more of them, but I was still just walking around really confused, not certain how long it would be prudent to stay, trying to look for people but feeling uncomfortable approaching them when they were talking to their families and so on.

I did talk to my old teacher from NISS, who attended the ceremony. It was nice to see him again, and he invited me and the other Norwegian graduates to join him at the Hog’s Head a bit later to hang out with the new students that came from NISS this year. I was only there for about an hour, but I talked to them a bit and it was nice.

After that I went to Frankie & Benny’s with Morten, mum and Abi. We had champagne and tasty dinners and wine, and afterwards Morten, Abi and I went to the Wheatsheaf while mum went back to the hotel cause she was tired. We got Abi tipsy, and talked to a bunch of strangers. Because I was still wearing the funny hat, everyone congratulated me and what-not, whether they knew me or not.

Yesterday, we checked out of the hotel and I left my stuff with Abi. Then I went out with my mum and Morten into town, we went shopping and had lunch at Wetherspoon’s, and then I saw them off to the train before I headed to the Wheatsheaf to meet Robin.

I was meaning to take a bunch of pictures, but it was just so lovely to see people again that I forgot. At first it was just Rob and I, and we talked about what we’d been up to over summer and everything. Then Dom showed up, which I hadn’t expected because he’d said he couldn’t come, and I got to talk to him a bit. Josh showed, too, and was there with us for the rest of the evening, and George L was there for a while, and some of his friends. Abi turned up, too. We stayed until Robin had to go home, and then we got some food at ASDA and went to Abi’s place where we ate a bit, and watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding on my laptop.

I’m sitting in Abi’s room right now. Probably getting out of here in a little while. I need to pack all the stuff I left here with her. It’s not that much, but I will probably have to expand my suitcase all the same. Then I’m gonna need some breakfast… I’ll probably go to town and get some, as Abi doesn’t really have anything in.

It’s been a lovely weekend, and I’m off home today. I’m gonna miss everyone I probably won’t see again in a very long time, though I’ve promised to come back some time during the academic year, possibly in February, when I have a week off from school, I think.

I love all my friends here to bits, and I wish you all the best!

I’m back for graduation now. It’s today, in about four hours, bit more. My mum, Morten and I arrived yesterday. We arrived reasonably early, round 6 pm, then we met up with Abi and went to Wolverhampton to eat at Nandos. We had a great evening. Then we went back to Walsall and stopped by the Wheatsheaf for a little while, where we ran into Josh, Emma and Lindsey, and a guy I suspect I may have met before but don’t know what he’s called.

It’s really strange being back here. It’s weird how much you forget. Not the people so much as the layout of things a little bit… It’s like stepping back into an old life. You know all the steps, you just have to remember them. Every time I come back to a place here, it’s like I never left, except I did, and I’ve been gone for nearly four months.

My life here was separate from my life at home. Because I was alone here, and there were all these new people and nothing was familiar, it was like it was a different world. When I got home, it was a bit like everything here became a distant memory. I don’t remember names and faces that I don’t see on Facebook every day, or have a bunch of photos of, before I suddenly see them and they’re just there, and I’m like, “Of course, that’s that person!”

It’s a bit ridiculous.

I’m a bit nervous of meeting all my classmates, too. At least some of them… A couple have unfriended me on Facebook, and I’m not sure why. I wonder if they’ll just ignore me when I see them or talk to me again or what. I don’t want to make a big deal of it. If they won’t speak to me, I’ll leave them alone. They don’t have to. And I don’t want any drama. This is supposed to be a happy day. I get to wear a funny hat!

No one told me that it would be this hard to grasp basic physics without yet understanding the basic math. They made me change my math because I wouldn’t have been able to understand the math I wanted to take without the course I’m in now, but they didn’t say anything about how difficult it would be to jump straight into phys 1 without having already mastered the math I’m currently taking at the same time.

This is going to be a very difficult few months. I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to pull this off. On Thursday I sat in my very first physics class, completely understanding the concept of everything I was being told, but not being able to verify or back it up with the appropriate math. I felt so stupid at the end of that lesson that I had to sit down with A Brief History of Time when I got home, which makes me feel smart because it doesn’t have any math in it, and, as I said, I get the concepts, I get the idea of it all.

I thought that maybe when I sat down with my homework on my own and tried to think it through, I would understand what I was doing, but it didn’t really work out that way. I’ve just spent about an hour labouring my way through two tasks from my book, trying to calculate speed and acceleration, and trying to read the same things off a graph. Is there some kind of trick for calculating seconds into minutes and seconds? Cause if I try to turn 400 seconds into minutes, I get 6.666666667, 6 being 6 minutes, but how many seconds is .666666667 minutes?

I want to understand this. I want to feel smart, but right now I just feel like a stupid kid who doesn’t understand anything at all.

The flat’s a mess. We haven’t cleaned the kitchen in a week, and the living room is full of empty take-out boxes, cause we’re hardly ever home at the same time to clean up together the way we usually do, or have dinner together.

I feel like everything’s crashing. I’m falling to bits. I want to understand all this stuff, but I can’t, and I just sit and stare at the page, willing it to make sense, and it just doesn’t. None of it does.

Things have been a bit mad lately… Well, they were mad and then they weren’t, so I took the opportunity to do nothing at all.

There was a lot of stressing from work to school on Tuesday and Wednesday as well, and by Wednesday afternoon I was beginning to notice a tickle in my throat and I was getting rather snively. By that evening, as I was sitting in an auditorium at school trying to understand fractions, it became clear to me that I had a fever as well, so I went home.

I didn’t have work on Thursday, and decided to take the Friday off which, as I haven’t been working long enough yet, meant that I had to go to the doctor and get a note confirming that I was indeed ill, so I could get sick pay.

As for my math course, I was even more pleased at the end of it than I had been the first day. I didn’t find any of it at all as difficult as I thought it would be. I was surprised to find that even fractions, which have been a problem for me all through school, were quite easy to understand for me. I guess my brain has evolved and I’ve gotten smarter or something. The only thing I had trouble with were negative numbers, when a plus sign becomes a minus and vise versa. Most of my mistakes were the right answer, only negative when it should be positive or positive when it should be negative.

Of course, this was only a refresher course, meant to make sure I’m up to speed when I start the real course on Wednesday. Hoping to God I’ll be able to keep this up.

Last Monday I started my new job. My kids are all adorable, though obviously there are some conflicts, as there will be. They’re all between 2 and 4, and I love them. There are no evil parents, either. It’s weird, though, I worked in so many east side kindergartens, with kids from every corner of the planet, and here all the kids are white and blonde. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart!

My co workers are mostly nice, too. There’s another temp who’s about 19 and really sweet (my opinion of her was raised further today when I found out she likes Placebo). Other than that, everyone else is older than me, but I get along with them fairly well, click here to know more.

On Tuesday I went climbing with my friend Sebastian, at Klatreverket. I had an awesome time, climbed a 10 metre wall all the way to the top. I got so sore! By Friday the aches and pains were finally letting up a bit and I could finally move my arms without wincing. Definitely doing that again, it was great!

This weekend, Morten and I went to London to stay with Morten’s friend Espen, who lives in Angel, and works for an effects studio, doing CGI stuff for movies. On Friday, Morten and I went to the Doctor Who Experience while Espen was at work, which was awesome. We now have a squishy Adipose stress toy! Yay! Then we went wandering around Soho, I got some new clothes and things. Also tea. And we went to Forbidden Planet, as that’s mandatory. That evening, we went for a meal with Espen at my favourite restaurant in London, a little Indonesian/Malay place called Bali Bali, in Shaftesbury Avenue. Then we went drinking with some Swedish friends of Espen’s.

On Saturday we went to Camden, where I got new shoes and a new jacket. Afterwards, we went for dinner at Nando’s and then to Shakespear’s Globe to see Doctor Faustus (by Kit Marlowe, one of Shakespear’s contemporaries). The production starred Arthur Darvill (Rory on Doctor Who) as Mephistopheles, and he did an absolutely fantastic job! It was a lot of fun getting to see a darker side of him. Morten and I are fairly certain we saw his father and siblings right next to us in the audience. The young guy was almost identical to him, and they all had his nose.

I love the theatre, but I don’t have a very good vocabulary for it. I don’t think there’s anything very constructive I can say about the play… The actors were great, the music was awesome, the play was funny and sad and a little bit disturbing, and made you laugh and gasp in all the right places. The Globe is a lovely theatre, too, and the acoustics are fantastic.

Yesterday we went to the British Museum to look at mummies before we got the tube out to Heathrow. We’d been meaning to have dinner there, but we got a little bit delayed, and then there were delays on the tube, they stopped our train at Northfields and we all had to get out, and then there was signal failure out to Terminal 5, so we could only take the tube to Terminals 1, 2, 3 and then change to the express out to Terminal 5, which all together took a good extra 45 minutes. So when we finally got through security our flight status was already Go to Gate, so we just stopped at Pret and bought something we could eat on the plane (BA don’t serve food in Economy Class anymore) and then hurried off to the gate.

Thankfully, the plane boarded ahead of schedule, and arrived almost half an hour early in Oslo, so I didn’t get home too late; only about midnight.

Today was the first of two planning days at work. We figured out practical things like shifts and routines, and discussed what we wanted to do with the kids, did health and safety risk assessments and so on. Tomorrow I’m going to an assistant seminar.

Today was also my first day of the introduction Math course at Bjørknes. I was surprised to find that I didn’t find the things we went through today by far as difficult as I had expected, and that’s given me new confidence. Maybe I’ll manage my courses and my job all at once after all. I’ll certainly be giving it my best, anyway.

I’ve been trying to occupy myself lately. It’s been difficult. After everything that happened, it’s like everyone’s in grief, and I tend to get get apathetic. I really want to turn it around, though, so I’ve been trying to write a bit. I’ve rebooted a novel I started when I was fifteen. Abi’s helping me edit and make it good, but I’m uncertain about whether to post it here or not. Frankly, it’s a bit embarassing…

I’ve also been working on a new song. It’s my tribute to the kids at Utöya (pardon the Swedish ö, this is my granddad’s computer in Finland. Also this keyboard is from the darkages and hell to type on). I wrote the melody and first couple of verses about a week ago, and finished the lyrics the other night. Today I worked on the chords and it’s sounding pretty good. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a recording when I get home and share it here.

I’m in Finland for my cousin’s confirmation, and to hang out with family. My cousin Jockum is here, too, I literally haven’t seen him in years. So that’s all good.Yesterday, before we got here, my granddad fell off a ladder and dislocated his shoulder. By the time they made it to the doctor it had got so swollen that he couldn’t do anything about it. The best thing to do is apparently to let it heal as it is, and his arm will be functional again. The only other option is surgery, which is more risky, so if this solution works, that’s the best thing.

I bought a CD in town today, by (I think) a local metal band called Underjord (“Underworld”, in English). I only listened to a couple of tracks in the shop, but I’ll post a review when I’ve listened through it properly. It sounded promising, though.

Other than that I’m mostly just freaked out about starting my new job on Monday. I feel like it’s gonna be weird… It’s been a long time since I’ve done this sort of work. I need to be careful in the beginning, make sure I don’t overstep my bounds. Still, I’ve met my boss, and my group leader, and lots of the people working there, and they’re all nice people, so I guess it’ll be fine.

I talked to an old friend on Facebook the other night, and we’ve decided to start climbing together. It’s been ages since I’ve done any climbing, and I only did it a couple of times, but he’s gonna teach me, and it’s a good excuse to hang out anyway. We lost touch a while back, so it’ll be good to catch up.

That’s it for now, I guess. I’ll get some music up soon. (I know, “That’s what you always say!”)

It’s really easy, at times like this, to feel sorry for ourselves. Norway has just experienced the greatest tragedy in our nation’s history, since WW2, and everything’s slowly going back to normal now. Today on Twitter, all the tweets from Norwegians were no longer about Breivik or Utøya or the bomb. People are going back to tweeting about music or movies or food. Facebook is returning to the mundane, and the views on my blog have diminished. I never thought I’d be happy about that, but it means we’re slowly returning to some kind of normalcy.

And this is when I look up and realise that while the Earth has stood still here in Oslo, everywhere else it’s kept on turning. This weekend there was a terrible train wreck in China. According to the New York Times, 43 people were killed and 210 were injured. This too is a great tragedy.

In Ghana they’re cracking down on gays, with Paul Evans Aidoo, the Western Region Minister, ordering the arrests of all openly gay people, and encouraging landlords and tenants to inform on people they suspect of being gay.

Yesterday, Serbian protesters attacked and set fire to a security post on the border between Serbia and Kosovo, and Syrian forces killed at least 8 people in a raid on the town of Kanaker.

And, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, Amy Winehouse is dead.

All around the world people are suffering and dying, there’s violence and conflict and disaster and death all round. We’re not the only ones who have experienced a tragedy in the past week. I guess my point is that with distance comes perspective. This hit us. This was close to home. I think I’ll be viewing the news a little differently from now on. Be less quick to change the channel and dismiss bad things as happening far away, because as we now know, they could be happening here.

It’s not that I’m no longer sad. I really am, all the time. But I’ve been able to express my sadness in the past couple of days, and that’s left me with a feeling of extraordinary relief.

Today we had a rose march in memory of everyone we’ve lost, and in protest against the terrorist. Well, it was supposed to be a march. As it turned out, 150,000 people showed up at city hall to partake (and that’s not counting the people who wouldn’t fit there) and it really wasn’t physically possible to pull off. That’s a quarter of the city’s population, all trying to gather in one place. So instead of a march, we got to stand together in a sea of roses, and listen to appeals by the prime minister, the mayor of Oslo and the crown prince, among others, and performances by several great musicians. I was there with Chris. And we sang the national anthem, and what I suppose I could call a youth anthem called “Til ungdommen” or “For the Youths” (doesn’t sound as poetic), and we talked to people we didn’t know, and we cried with them.

When it was all over, we met up with Chris’s boyfriend Martin, who hadn’t been able to reach us in the throng, and we stuck our roses in trees, and laid them down as near the destroyed government building we could get, and we went to have dinner at my favourite Vietnamese restaurant.

I have cried, and I have shared my grief with 150,000 people, and it’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I feel an intense relief, and an extreme exhaustion at the same time. I think tonight I may finally sleep well.

EDIT: Nope, scratch that, I’ve still got my irrational and childish “I don’t wanna sleep” thing going. There’s only one option now. More Glee.

Photo by Henrik Lied, shamelessly stolen from NRK.

Day 3, and life moves on. I haven’t cried yet. I’m waiting for the moment to come when I break down and weep, but it hasn’t happened yet. I feel somewhat emotionally barren. I haven’t really had a strong emotional reaction yet.

When we hit that cat in Finland, the reaction was delayed. About 15 minutes after it happened, when we were back in the car and driving on, I cried. I guess this is much bigger, so the reaction will come later.

I’ve seen many moving things in the past couple of days. Yesterday we went to a pub in town with some people, to have a drink and talk things over. We went to the cathedral, too, where people have been laying down flowers and lighting candles since they could get close enough to do so. It was really touching how many people wanted to remember and do something for everyone we’ve lost. But I didn’t start crying.

This photo, by Tommy Ellingsen, that’s been floating around the web, depicts the prime minister hugging the leader of AUF and is fantastically moving and beautiful, but it wasn’t enough to make me cry.

When I was watching the news on Friday, and blogging here and trying to keep up with everything, I didn’t cry either. I got upset, and tired, and when the death toll from Utøya started coming in I felt really sick, but it was like I wouldn’t let the sadness in.

Today I went to church, as we were having a short memorial service. I lit candles, and we sang hymns, and there were lots of people grieving and crying, even though they didn’t know anyone who’d been hurt in the attacks. I didn’t. I just stood there, with my candle lit, singing along and trying to listen to the message our priest was trying to get across to us, but I just felt emotionally cold. Like there was nothing there.

I’m not very religious. I was raised Eastern Orthodox, since I was about eight, and even before that I had a lot of Christian influences in my life. When I was a kid it was easy to believe, to take the church and the hymns and everything at face value. I felt proud to be a part of that community, happy to go to church every Sunday, I participated in everything I could and I loved it. Then I grew up, and I started having doubts. I know it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, but the more I think about it the more I feel like I wasn’t supposed to be religious. I still believe in God – or some sort of God, anyway – but I don’t feel at home in a church anymore. I don’t feel like I belong.

I thought that today might be different. I truly believed that today I would walk into that room and feel something. But I didn’t, really. I just felt empty.

My city and my country has changed forever. Yesterday I saw armed soldiers protecting parliament and guarding the closed off areas. This is Oslo, no one carries firearms here. It’s surreal and just really crazy. I miss my town, I want it back, but nothing is ever gonna be the same again now…

Yesterday at the pub, we started talking about how Breivik is likely to be punished. The maximum prison sentence in Norway is 21 years, but we also have something called “forvaring”, which I suppose could be translated to “custody”, which means that even when he’s completed that sentence, if he’s not deemed fit to return to society he’ll stay locked up. Theoretically, he could stay in jail indefinitely. Still, some people were saying how we should change our laws and extend the 21 years. My friend Ted said something very clever to that. He said that we shouldn’t let this pissant change the way we think. We shouldn’t let him change our laws or our compassion or the way our country works, because if we do, then he’s won.

This is in agreement with what the prime minister said Friday night. That our response to this tragedy should not be revenge, but an even more open, even more democratic society than we already have.

One of these days all this is gonna sink in, probably while I’m completing a totally mundane task like cooking or doing the dishes or hoovering the bedroom (if I ever get round to that, it’s overdue) and I’m gonna break down completely. For now I’ll just have to try to ignore this feeling in the pit of my stomach and hope that I’ll feel something soon.

Last photo by imzadi755.