jeg liker ikke Zoolander and suck at blogging....

obviously this is not my favorite thing to do...
which is not surprising...
we all know that I am a bit too fundicted (addicted to fun)...
why would I want to report when I could be doing...

I just watched a cam-torrent of Superbad and I have to agree with one of my BFFs Mrs. Danielle Schechter (you're still Miss Danielle Rupinski to me which is not cuz I don't acknowledge your marriage which I fully do... YOU'RE AWESOME MIKE JUST DON'T GO TO MED SCHOOL ... just maybe cuz my mom kept her name and that is rad and you are rad and really I should get on with my bloggig) that SUPERBAD was (with the exception of some of the cop stuff) super GOOD. Seth Rogen - I apologize to you for torrenting your wonderful movie. You are todays John Hughes -- a rad and totally authentic proximity to teen nerd radness... ANYWAY if I don't quite sound like usual myself it's because I just want to be like that movie right now... well it's fading (I just worked it out through some posturing...) The ending somehow reminded me of WEIRD SCIENCE and that is never a bad thing.

but my friend Dylan is making me look bad...
...Dylan and I were in SIM/art-school together and now he's in Germany/Tyskland/Alemania for a while doing some sort of video graphics something or other...
Dylan has a blog and he actually uses it once in a while... he said it is mostly for family so I am not linking to it...
it has pictures of his apartment and stuff like that
and he actually posts to it more than once in a while

last night was lame and cool
today i got some more clothing (f'ing time)
because there was a really damn big flea market at a grade school near here
Steindal Skole

I paid 160NOK (~$25.00) for a trashbag full of clothes... I know this doesn't sound like such a great deal but here it is a great deal and most of the stuff I snagged really seems almost new and the stuff that isn't is still fine... I'd been wearing the hat for a while when the woman told me how much I should pay and forgot to tell her to price it in... I say she told me how much I should pay because apparently they don't haggle. She said 160 and I thought about the numbers and said "Can you do 140?" and she hit my guilt button with "I think 160 is quite cheap for this" and she was right and it was a difference of only about $3.00 I don't know why the numbers seem more important when they are bigger...

never try to use those sideways carat brackets in a blog it's a big headache that confuses tags and you lose a bunch of text here... stupid male modelling movies blah blah. here are way too many pictures of me in all of my new clothing... and some pictures of my room...
and me being boring with captions...
hmm.

i should say other smart things about the differences between here and there but again i'd rather be doing something else i have been awake until at least 4:00 the past two nights and i was going to relax tonight but my actual norskkurs classmates want me to come to dinner and then there is a housewarming party for some norwegian girls and i am not supposed to pass up opportunities to interact with norwegians

-i nearly burn my skin off at least once a week because the hot water is ridiculously x 10 hot -- you could cook an egg or pasta in it easily.
-i have only seen police in any way like three or four times since arriving here and at least one of those times was when i was at the politi stasjon
-regular size refundable bottles net you 1 kr and 1.5 liter bottles and some other smaller ones will get you 2 kroner and 50 øre (50 øre is the smallest coin - worth about 9 cents) so making a LITTLE money by collecting bottles is not such a herculean task here - it might be balanced out by the cost of living but i think the folks that will bother to collect bottles are also folks who know how to find the cheap stuff... i wanted to say sisyphean cuz i love sisyphus but...
-my toe hurts cuz i ripped too much of the nail off
-i have to teach some people to cook (and shop for cooking)
-by which i mean that i am now a professor of cooking stuff
blah blah blah

clickable thumbnails



the approach to my room.

my mess and the hvit (white) brick walls that make me hate this place

note how the windows are so completely dumbly designed and open out over the desk at a height that could decapitate my computer. i have to sit sort of inside the (swing of the) window to sit at my desk. if it opened flat to the wall that'd be okay - but it hits one of it's own handles at a certain far less than comfortable or convenient point. i could move the desk but only to face a brick wall.

the best solution (short of dismantling the window to get that other handle off so i could open it all the way - maybe i will try that later) turned out to be a shoelace tied to an eye hook...

the ever useful slip knot.


i bought myself this rug which is one of those hard to capture bright colors. and my feet. because i know that some people were worried they'd never see my feet again.

FASHIONISTA INDULGENCE BOREDOM PROGRAM


Honey I'm home......... and I'm crazy......... about dancing like Bill Cosby in the opening sequence of the Cosby Show but with a pink scarf.


I got bored...

So I started trying to throw the scarf in synch with the self-timer. It's not really easy with the timing of the indicator on my camera. I had to take a lot of shots to get some in the actual air. I mean... I am performing magic...

I didn't buy any real pants at the flea so I am wearing the bahting suit I bought with pineapple which I now call ananas.



plain black... comfy. classic.

i tried a double..... and apparently got angry.



this shirt is nice I guess but the buttons are clustered strangely in twos which makes it hard to button at the top.

i forgot one green-brown turtleneck sweater because it was drying when i took the pictures. i am put this blog to bed and i am going to put the sweater on now because i am gal og kald.

oh. and clearly i shaved. it was a bad move.

Hei! You look like...

It's not easy being a hairy American... :P

Last week (with beard)
- Tom Hanks (from Castaway) 5+

Last week (with beard and knit cap)
- B-real (from Cypress Hill) 1

This uka (beard reduced to wide moustache)
- "Hi, my name is Earl." 5+
- Borat 1

I didn't mind the first few Earl comments when they were said to my face - Jason Lee is a handsome dude. The rest are not dudes I want to evoke. I think the moustache might take a vacation as well in favor of increased make-out potential.

At least 90% of the music I hear here is the worst of American radio-chaff. Most of the programming on TV is American with Norsk subtitles - except for the cartoons which are American with Norsk dubbing. Same at the theaters. Yes - thanks - I do know that Sacha Baron Cohen is British. The Borat movie was all about unhealthy obsession with America.

Open letter to the world: We're not that cool. Yes - there is a lot of good music in the states - but most of it is never recorded and you'll never hear the bits that are unless systems of media distribution continue to change. Please try to focus somewhere else for the next 100 years. Iran has some nice (slow) cinema and Germany is supposed to have incredible theater.

Også - Also

So.
Wow. I just met my first actually helpful administrative Nordmann. The first person who let me point out a problem without getting defensive. Toosen takk RANDI! Du er veldig flink! You are very clever.
I visited Randi yesterday and explained my beef with the unnecessary fees and redundant bureaucracy and just plain ridiculousness of asking me to put down 3 000 NOK against trashing my room when they already have control over 81 000 NOK of my flow. I went back today and she'd taken care of the problem. Randi arranged for a direct transfer of my funds from the SiT general account to the SiT bolig (residence) account. She wrote up a tiny little english contract paragraph missing some key phrasing. We added it - printed it - I signed and *poof* fees and running all over town - gone. Wow.
When we were all stuck in the basement the SiT bolig people just stood there like deer in headlights and would put their hands up defensively and cry "It's not our fault!" and then turn and run away.

She even said that maybe I am helping to change their systems for the better - has no one pointed out the ridiculousness before? Anyway -- Randi = A+ Nordmann!!

Også.
Last night I played my first Norwegian ultimate. I am going to try to be nice because someday someone might read this... but DAMN!!! that sucked. Like SUPER GIANT BOLD TYPEFACE NEON LIGHTS !!!!!! SUCKED. I will be back every single time - but I won't be quite so happy about it.
I am used to an organic pick-up game. I don't need a stack or score or a dump - but this was like a jostled hive of hornets and another jostled hive of hornets. People running willy-nilly. Hospital passes all day and night. Everyone dropping everything. Arms flailing (the previously mentioned Jude is a tall long armed guy who doesn't run with his arms in near his sides and wears a damn hard watch and didn't take it off and hugely back-handed/wristed/watched me in the forehead and my forehead is split open and bumpy right now). People just clogged each other to no end. Bah. Norwegians may be taller but they jump sucky.
Ugh! The group organizer seemed to have slightly more skill but not by much.
Out of close to 30 people (two games) - there were maybe four Norwegians that showed some skill or promise. There's German Andi who I tossed with last week and will enjoy playing against/with and there's my wee ruddy Scottish mate Sean Suckling - Little Flame - The Ginger Streak. Bigger heart than all of the others combined - he's brand new to it and can't throw very well but he'll quickly outdistance most of the other 26 if he really cares as much as he seems to. I need to send him an email and tell him I thought he did great and to not stress on throwing so much at the moment because nearly everyone starts in the role of receiver.
The fields were small and rocky and while the general field was a good width - the endzone was a more of a centered third-width box. This was okay (not great) when we were playing small fields of 4-on-4 or so - but went to complete shit when I convinced them to combine two smaller games into a larger game and the group leader wanted to keep the box. 7-8 people running into this box was not unlike visiting one of the city center bars on a Thursday night - uncomfortably crowded.
We played only maybe 1.5 hours - boo. When it was over I went to get my bike (left near the first game I played with) and came back to find everyone just finishing something that had them standing in a circle. The organizing group is a Christian Fellowship of some sort. Some sort of church group. They play disc on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
German Andi played with a different group (NTNUI) on Sunday (while I was picking blåbær) and he says they weren't quite so horrid. I hope I will play with them this Sunday but I am supposed to tour the Samfundet (student union club/bar/cafe/maze) and learn about volunteering and maybe doing some live sound there. My only fear is that they may have way fancier gear than any of the bars in Boston ever bother to pay for and that I may have to learn some fancy multi-tiered menu systems and crap before I can do even the simplest set-ups. Not that I can't usually figure that shit out - but to have to do it in a language I don't yet really know - that has DISASTER POTENTIAL for sure. The tour is at 1800 and the game at 2000 - hope to do both.

I haven't seen any metal yet. :(
Ha det bra!

Hjem Søt Hjem

It's been something like 12 days (11 and change) since my last post og (and) I apologize for that... I have definitely had time to post but not the will.

I've been in my room since the evening of the 17th and it's OK (ooh-koh) and I have been attending class since Mondag. I have 12 hours of sit down class per week and 1 hour of conversation on Fridays - not happening this week because we don't have enough words yet.

Hei. Jeg heter Seth, og jeg kommer fra Boston.
Hva heter du? Hvor kommer du far?

One very nice thing about norsk - no conjugation. Tenses yes. Conjugation no.

Jeg HETER Seth.
Hva HETER du?
Han HETER Kyung-Te. Hun HETER Antonia. Det HETER...
Vi HETER... Dere HETER... De HETER...

Get it?
I don't have to learn a bunch of different verb forms for different peoples/pronouns/pronomen.

MY ROOMMATES
------------
- Julia (don't pronounce the "J") kommer fra Tyskland (I haven't yet sussed out how that means Germany) og (don't pronounce the "g") will be freeze-drying food og learning norsk. She drinks only carbonated water and brought her own carbonater men (but) needs a new gas cartridge.
- Salah kommer fra Bangladesh. He's about 30 and will be studying... I forget. We don't talk about school. Bangladeshi often eat with their hands. He tries not to eat with his hands in front of others but I saw him and it looked like great fun and we are going to try together.
- Jean-Julian kommer fra Frankrike. He's studying architecture. Will be going to Kina (China) for a month with class and has been in the flat only about two hours in the last week.
------------

On Sunday I went blueberry picking with a Wolfram (Tyskland/Germany M), Jude (Nord-England/Northern England M), Im (Sør Korea/South Korea F), and Stella (Hellas/Greece F). Im and Stella are former kjellerfolk (cellar people). Tuesday night I went fishing with Mathis and Marc (Tyskland M) and together we caught 10 herring in a few hours - or more than few - didn't feel sporting to use lures og no bait at all.
Wolfram and Jude bor sammen. They live together in the flat just below mine. While I was fishing they followed through on the plan to make Jam from our blueberries.
Last night I grilled four herring with garlic stuffed in their bellies.
My small end table is covered in ripening green plums from a tree not far from here.
For a while I was eating the rose hips that grow everywhere while I walked from place to place - there's not much too them but if you carefully eat just the outside layer they are pretty tasty.
No dumpstering yet - life has been exhausting.

Bleh. This whole blog was supposed to be in list form so I didn't have to type so much... but... food is expensive but food can be quite cheap. Yesterday I biked down (I live near the top of a ridiculous hill system) to a new supermarket (new for me) to take advantage of a one-day 40% off deal on frukt og grønt (fruits and vegetables).

I know that my first picture should be some sort of glorious mountain-to-fjord hiking trip panorama - but it isn't. Here is my receipt from yesterday.



Let me indulge in some math. Here's how we convert units. And figure out just how cheap some things are.

Let's pick two items. The clementines and the carrots (gulrot).
The 40% was taken off at the end so I will do the same.



I don't think I have ever bought clementines by the pound but $1.19 seems pretty damn good for - even the $2.00 that it would have cost before the -40% seems pretty sweet. Same with carrots. I forgot to think about the Kg/lbs relationship until yesterday. Am I right? Even without the 40% off that's pretty sweet compared to American produce prices.

Quickly some of the other vegetables. At full and discounted prices...
Hodekal (cabbage) $1.26-0.75/lb
Tomater (pretty nice ones) $3.17-1.90/lb
Bananer $1.42-0.85/lb
Ferkspotet (fresh taters) $1.18-0.71/lb
And the Kroner has actually gone down in the last few weeks (I enter the country and the currency drops... coincidence?) so these are actually slightly inflated. I actually just made myself curious about NOK/USD activity around my arrival...


Next time I go to the market I will bring my calculator and maybe I can actually afford the brussel sprouts I've been wanting. I can eat them with hvitøk while watching Headbanger's Ball on the TV I pulled from the trash.

There was a lot of other stuff I wanted to say but thus has taken a long time now.
Ask me questions if you like. I think I am going to drop some Duckets, nei, Kroner on some new gearing for my bike today and a few tools so I can try to do the work myself. Also I need to figure out a phone sooner rather than later. Until then you can AIM or SKYPE me if I am near my computer. And if you ask for my address you can mail me something.

I'm off to argue about having to pay ridiculous fees just to give money back to the organization that is already holding all of my money. It would go something like this - pay SiT (studenter i trondheim) 100NOK for them to write me a check from my money that is sitting in their SiT general account - then pay a fee at the bank to cash the check at a bank and pay another 65NOK at the bank or post office to pay the bill for the security deposit for my SiT owned/managed room. They want a relatively small amount money from me to make sure I won't trash their room but they already have control of ALL of my money. Not likely.

I guess you deserve a nice picture now. Or two. Or some nice ones and some not so nice ones and some others.

Here's my beard and facial expression while hiking.

Same hiking trip. WE ARE LEGION!

Hmm...

Det er my moustache in front of a statue of the last king.
I need a better shot of it - my moustache and not the king statue.
Cuz it looks funnier than this.


Og de er some nature something-or-others.




Ha det bra! "Have it well." = GOODBYE

BLAH

so.
i have a lot of new friends because we have been forced to live in one basement room together.
school and semi-independent housing association have fucked up and none of our rooms are available - they said sheepishly "well it's not our fault" in front of all of us - what? i can't think clear or know what to write about because there is so much. i bought some bread and cold cooked chicken and brown cheese (goat+cow = a little sweet) and some carrots and an onion and a tin of makeral in tomato sauce on friday after i got here and have been eating crumbly sandwiches since then. i really want hot food - which i will maybe get tonight at a BBQ at the other student village tonight. i live most of the way up a gigantic hill. i don't know how high i climb but it makes me want a granny gear (wish i'd had one put on before i left)
i just asked for this word - kjellerfolk (sounds like "shelleh") - basement folk
our basement room is the chinese student union space and they came to both us a little bit the other day when i was still half asleep
our basement houses 4 koreans (the girl is very friendly - the men less so but one shows some potential with a frisbee)(more on beating my frisbee to shit in a parking lot some other time), 1 italian knucklehead who totally does not fit my mental understanding of italians (red-blonde and gets far too embarassed far too easily), 1 gangly tall irish-man who will work here rather than study, a blond russian, an absentee fenchman (he's missing all of the group fun), a spunky greek woman *koff* cute/smart/fun/etc *koff* and me.
my pronunciation has been commended by many people from many country - saying french names and korean names and norwegian words (i have learned very little norwegian so far - which is frustrating - but i will have many months of classes starting soon so i will wait patiently)(i have some italian from my walking time with simone who initially introduced himself as simon which i wouldn't accept - simone is plenty easy to say)
now we're sitting around doing fuck all in the housing office because the basement is a bit depressing. orientation starts tomorrow and i have an offer of housing from an american friend of susan's who has lived here for 30 years.
anyway - please distribute this blog address to anyone you know who might care for an update - i am going to go back to the actual experience in progress.
i have very limited internet access. there is very little wireless around here. more on the actual campus - but they block P2P completely so i don't know how i will keep up with certain american things thta make me feel comfortable (comic books, some TV, movies, books) hoping to find some way around it but i guess maybe they catch you eventually - the swedish don't care a bit about this shit - i thought it would be the same here - bleh
we're learning to count in each other's languages and i am missing it

i'm in some south-easterly neighborhood of Oslo
or i might be somewhere in Canada
overnight train tonight - i'll see Trondheim by 0730
and my room some time tomorrow afternoon
more for real later

i want to go outside and i am hungry

whoa!

"
Because the plot thickens every day
And the pieces of my puzzle keep crumblin' away
But I know, there's a picture beneath
"

Faith No More
Falling To Pieces
The Real Thing


Okay - backwards forwards...
Pieces of this puzzle slowly (sometimes surprisingly quickly) drift into place.
I just bought a used (half-damaged) Tablet PC off of eBay. I have been lusting after these things. It's a Motion Computing LE1600 with a cracked but supposedly fully functioning screen. Even though I rarely buy anything any more - my eBay technique is still flawless.

I talked to this guy a whole bunch about the machine. He's had it for a year and a half - dropped it within the first few months - so it's been working in this condition for over a year. The cracked screen LE1600 and the proprietary-ish optical drive that's backordered on Motion Computing's website for the next 12 weeks for less than the price of the drive and a two year warranty. My grandmother has offered to help - so I will buy all of the accessories and memory for this thing and if it lasts two years at that price I will have gotten my money's worth and then some. I will get another used LE1600 and I will have all of the memory and drives and keyboard and what not already worked out. I will have an extra extra battery (provided it lasts that long - KEN AVERY is about to head to Germany to work on making the world's batteries better - I trust KEN) and I will legally be able to sell the extra Windows XP Tablet Edition licenses and I will be used to the way the thing works and it will be probably a pretty cheap way to continue.

I will be able to take notes that actually communicate and record things as I think them. I will be able to draw circuit diagrams straight into the computer. Unlike paper notes - these notes will be fully word searchable. So when I am in my third year and need to reference something about passive filtering from the third year I won't have to search endlessly through old notebooks and notated handouts - I will be able to just type in my search word and I will find all of the references in my own handwriting and with whatever little communicating drawings or symbols I have written. I can draw my homework out on the tablet and then print it and still have an exact copy for myself. If/when I start programming in MAX/MSP again (it'll be the first software I load when I get this thing) I will be able to very quickly draw out programs. Almost just sketch them out the way I used to do into notebooks on the bus - but straight into the environment instead. Oh man - I can draw computer programs. And I can start blogging in "INK" - my own handwriting. So. Should I start a different BLOG that is about my new tablet computing experiences? There are a lot of tablet blogs out there. But I think it might be different enough that I should keep my "new NORWAY experience" blog and my "new TABLET experience" blog separate. Okay. I will try to do that once it gets here. I will cross post this I guess.

To draw and write as I have since crayon filled youth - but on a computer. I love. Hmm. This will be the one thing I will have that Norwegian's will be jealous of. They'll be perplexed by many things but jealous of not much. Maybe also of my frisbee stamina and verve and my unkempt beard - but that's it.

I also told the seller BGTREEFROG that once I am able I will design a chirpy little synthstrument and call it the TREE FROG because I am so psyched. I will probably end up forgetting and being a liar on that one but maybe not. Synthstrument is a dumb word.

Also - yes - I have booked the second flight-leg of my travel (~$56) and know that my bike will cost less than $60 all told to get to Trondheim. I will stay in Oslo for roughly a night and a day and will stop by a bike shop to buy a very hefty lock (I hope they carry very hefty locks - Kryptonite NY chain I am thinking) and a new helmet (maybe).

I have transferred more than $14K into 81K NOK in a student holding account.
I have applied for my student residence permit (about a month later than I should have).
I have learned that there are 25-30000 students in Trondheim and that 90% of them use bicycles as their main transport - AWESOME!!!

I still haven't looked up average or minimum Norwegian wage. Okay I just looked and there is no mandated min.wage just lots of union agreements. That might mean I can find work that I am allowed to have but will pay pretty low - which is much better than not really being able to find/secure work. Something I just read hints at a "minimum wage" around 90 NOK per hour - that's something like $15.12 (1 NOK~=.168USD - wait - nope - the Kroner took a small jump in the last few days - I got a better deal on my money transfer than I thought - nice - so 1 Krone (kroner is plural?)) =.1715USD so 90NOK ~= $15.43. So. If I need roughly 81,400 NOK/yr to stay (I just have to refill my accounts to that much so if I spend less I don't need to make that much) - but... imaging that if I spend everything they think I will need to spend (and maybe this first year I will....) I will need to find 81400/90= or 900+ hours of work.. which comes to like 22 40 hour weeks or hmm. This is all completely speculative... I will need to find work - I am happy to wash dishes or just bust my ass lifting and carrying heavy things or whatever - I don't know for sure that this whole 6 year plan is sustainable (stupid buzzword).

"Normal working hours are mandated by law and limited to 37½ hours per week."
Lazy bastards. Which I really don't mean. So. 904/37.5=24+ full weeks of work - I am allowed 20hrs/wk during the school year. Yeah - reasonable people.
Reasonable, mostly blond people. Blah numbers. Money. TABLET!!!

That was longer than I intended. This thing still can't get the correct Trondheim time without my help.

Nice when parts of a plan come together.
I hope the Royal Norwegian Consulate General isn't taking tomorrow off.
They have to get my residence permit application processed.
The end.