Why I need feminism

The anti-feminism statements online are painful and disturbing, and since I can't really figure out if those girls are being set up by male friends, if they are paid to do it, or if they are for real (what's with all those references to Poland, for instance?), I can at least consider my own connection to feminism. So, today's blog-post is a long and rambling description of my own relationship to feminism, and how what I considered personal experiences grew into political awareness.

I never defined myself as a feminist. That was because I never joined the organisations, organised the 8th of March rallies, or spoke up for women's rights in public arenas. I did not, however, believe that my life would be better if there were no feminists. I was too painfully aware of the battles that gave me the rights I had. And when my students started arguing against feminism when it was on the curriculum, I chose to address, but not worry about their arguments, and rather teach them to question, to observe and to think. An observant, thinking woman with a varied experience will see what it's all about, was my logic. And while I can't speak of them all, enough of them did come back to tell me that they had realised I was right, that I now feel my choices were justified.

And that's when I realised that my lack of a feminist card didn't matter.

I suspect the girls on the "women against feminism" blog (if you want to find them, also take a peek at "cats against feminism". It makes as much sense.) would have claimed my life is not that of a feminist. I am married and have two children and a grandchild, I frequently cook for my husband and all the kids, I need men to help me with the heaviest stuff, I even prefer to let my husband do things like changing tires and fixing leaks. I worry about my hair, and, in my old age, I have started wearing a bra. It's just more comfortable. I don't attack men just because of their gender, I don't insist on having jobs I am not qualified for just because I am female, and I don't call for female supremacy. I guess according to the internet definition, I am not a feminist.

However:
My husband cooks for me as often as I cook for him. We clean the house together, and whoever is the last to leave for work, or the first to return, does the dishes and gets the little tasks done. I am a bit better at remembering important maintenance details, I remember bills and savings and numbers, I update calendars and initiate changes. I have a better sense of space and distance, and I am more intuitively sensitive. He is better at researching, spends more time on getting the details right, remembers birthdays, is more polite and worried about what people will say, and is also physically stronger and able to go on after I have fallen asleep. When the children were small, he'd let me sleep in, after I had been up to breastfeed during the  night. He will do more dishes, but I will make sure we get all the laundry done, not just what's on top of the basket. He will take the car to the workshop, but I will notice the changes that makes it necessary. We complement each other in ways which have nothing to do with our genders, and everything to do with personal abilities. What does that have to do with feminism? Feminism permits it.

My background is a story of parents who wanted something different for their daughters. My father taught us that we could do what ever we wanted, from driving vans, steering boats and operating power tools to knitting and cooking. My mother taught us how important it was to have these skills, by exposing the ugly underbelly of expectations and limitations to us, how women were not the masters of their own bodies, their own education, their own employment, mainly through the example of her own struggles. Our father gave his daughters confidence to act, our mother gave us a strong sense of the importance of independence and the need for society to change in order to permit that independence.

With this background independence and equality wasn't an option, it was an imperative. Oh, I know the fears of every woman, and quite a bit about the harm we can expect. "#yeseverywoman" could have had my tweets right along the others. But I knew the trap of "traditional roles", of retreat into the safety of "normality" for what it is. This is why I today take such immense delight in the options I have. Living with hard-won options, in a society where I have at least a chance at employment at my level of skill, where my daughter can marry the woman she loves and my son can work in a pre-school during the summer term, and where nobody thinks it's odd when my husband cuddles our granddaughter - a society where there are nappy-changing tables in both male and female toilets - is something I am deeply grateful for.

Still, I don't initiate contact with strange men. I prefer to ride my bike, rather than walk home through empty streets. I speak to and try to support, advice and function as a reference for female scholars, nurturing their strength when I can. I grieve when I meet women who have been abused, and I know enough of fear to share their pain. I let myself be engaged in supporting the research on female health, as the research tends towards a heavy gender bias where the man is the model for the healthy human being , disregarding the very differences which are supposed to be "celebrated". I know we have come a long way, but until men can stay home with their kids if they want to, until women and men are paid the same for the same job, until girls can play video games without being shamed, and boys can wear pink and be a princess if that's what they want, I don't make the error of saying I don't need feminism. Every year makes me more of a feminist.

And it makes me want to cry to watch those girls claim they don't need feminism. They need feminists to fight for medication suited for women, they need feminists to fight for their rights when they hit their heads in the glass ceiling, they need feminists to support the shelters, they need feminists to fight for the rights of their husbands as well as their own. Feminists have, elsewhere, negotiated paid leave for new fathers, and that hated quota system? It doesn't bring the incapable into power, it ensures that the capable and educated have a chance.

I am still embarrassed by the extreme fanatics though. However, those are embarrassing no matter what you believe in. It's why I back off, quickly, when somebody talk about r-e-l-i-g-i-o-n. Or the advantages of Apple computers.

So why do I need feminism? I need feminism because I want a world where men and women have equal opportunities, without gender-based pressure or harassment. And it doesn't happen for neither women nor men without awareness and struggles.

Confessions of a research object

It wasn't an experiment. I don't know where I picked up the bug that started it all, but I had been unusually active that autumn, working out, studying hard, living in an old, cold building and eating cheaply and badly. I was a skinny, poor student in a cold rainy city, and while I considered it a good life, my body didn't have the resources needed to fight the bug when it reached me.

We were planning to go away for a few days, but we had to give up that thought, because I was throwing up and had a fever. When my boyfriend - now husband - came back from the university, I was weak, had fever fantasies and spots. I couldn't remember to have had measles, so we assumed that was it, and we settled down to wait for it to pass. At some point during the night, I got a headache that felt like it was about to kill me. I managed to make my boyfriend go call a doctor. This was before cell-phones, and even before it was common for a poor student to have a phone at home, so he walked to the nearest phone-booth and called a doctor.

The doctor was there almost before him, came in, looked at me, and immediately started banging on the neighbour's door to borrow their phone. Yes, doctors didn't have cellphones either. Three minutes later I was on a stretcher in an ambulance, on the way to the hospital. Eight minutes later they were hooking me up to just about everything. Fifteen minutes later I was in a coma.

I don't know what happened for the next two days. I am told I fought the doctors and nurses and had to be restrained, or I'd pull the needles out of my body. I am told they paraded entire classes of medical students past me to see and take note of my symptoms, threatening the students that if they ever ignored such, they could just hand in their licenses right then and there. They tapped as much blood from me as they safely could, for diagnosis and study. When I finally woke up I was in a strange room, black and blue and hurting from the amount of needles and the harsh medication that had hit my veins, and there was a nurse stationed by my side in case something happened. I was alive, but nobody really knew how alive I was yet.

I was not well. Mainly, I didn't notice what I was saying. I would think one thing and say another. To this day I have a slight case of aphasia, of not having the right word, of feeling language slip away from me. Or maybe I don't, perhaps I am just more aware of it now, after that experience. I can fake it well enough, it just means I have to double-check if I want to lecture. I overprepare, just to make sure all the words are there, and I know what they mean. They may be gone in a moment's notice, to return at odd times.

But I healed up, slowly. I was young, 22 years old, fit and strong after all. I did lose some hearing, but not enough to be a problem in everyday life. I did however get half a year worth of study wiped, which hit me hard during next term's exam. I hadn't known that it was lost, and so I hadn't known to go back and repeat it. For the first month after I was not allowed to focus. I couldn't read, watch television, listen to the radio. I went home to my parents, walked the dog, rested, learned to eat again, had involved and silly conversations with my boyfriend.

Most of all though, I was cherishing being alive. After I was out of isolation and moved to another room in the hospital, a doctor came in, sat down in the chair next to me and grinned. "You are born again," he told me. "You should be dead. But you live. This is a whole new life for you." That man was dr Alfred Halstensen, at the time working on his Ph D on meningococcal disease. For the next couple of years he kept tapping as much blood as he safely could when ever he summoned me to the hospital.

I was one of the few that autumn of 1983 who survived meningitis at Haukeland Hospital, and I was an adult who could describe carefully what had happened, and who had been strong enough to insist on medical attention before it was too late. I got a spot on his graph for his Ph. D. all to myself, as the 100% survivor of being admitted in the middle of the night, and his plan for all that blood was to use it in the effort to create a vaccine. Today there is a vaccine against some types of meningitis. It isn't one of the mandatory vaccines, but it is used to protect people in cases when epidemics are about to break out. With a disease that had, at the time, more than a 50% mortality rate, and which also tends to create mini-epidemics in otherwise healthy communities, you want that protection if there is a case at a pre-school or a military camp near you.

Now, a vaccine resister could use parts of my story to say that it's healthy for the body to battle disease. For years after that very close brush with death, I didn't even get a sore throath. My immune system was working overtime to keep me healthy, something dr Halstensen had said would happen. That vaccine resister can sadly not tell that to another Torill. At about the same time as I battled meningitis and kind of won, in another hospital another woman my age, with the same name, lost. The mortality rate was 50%. For once I was on the right side of those percentages.

This event changed my life in a myriad different ways, some to the better, some to the worse. I suspect quite a few health issues can be traced back to the enormous doses of antibiotics they used to save my life. They claimed to have "whitewashed" my body, killed all bacteria they could, to make sure they got the ones that were killing me. That is not only a good thing, no matter what a miracle modern antibiotics are. The alternative is much worse though. On the up side, I lost the fear of death. I am on my second life. How many people get a second chance? I walk through life with that as a backdrop: Every moment I have here is a miracle - a miracle of modern science. When things get dark and dreary, I consider the alternative, and enjoy the fact that I am actually here, feeling angry, frustrated or depressed. When things are bright they are twice as bright, just because I am here to experience it.

The people who resist vaccines can never have been on that side of life - over the line to death, and then dragged back by expertice and drugs. They can never have felt the extreme pain, the pain that made me wish I was dead, if the headache would just end, the pain that made me kick and fight and finally black out into a two-day coma. I don't ever want another person to feel that, to experience that. I would have given dr Halstensen and the research crew at the hospital all the blood he asked for, without much thought of personal safety, to make certain that no child would ever need to feel the pain I felt that night. Luckily he was a responsible professional, an ethical researcher, and I was protected, informed and educated through the process.

I am writing this story because of the anti-vaccination movement. They are using emotional arguments against rational arguments, using fear and pictures of babies to reach hearts, while the rational arguments of scientists aim for the heads. But where do the vaccines come from? From people like me, the blood of survivors of bitter battles, living despite the odds to become a lover, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a scholar, a researcher. I am both heart and head, and both parts of me appreciate being alive, thanks to the doctors that work to develop vaccines to save the world from the pain I went through, the pain that made it possible for me to be of some, tiny little bit of help.

Grandmother in the age of the internet

I have been a grandmother for more than 6 months. The girl in question is very much the child of a modern family: the daughter of my daughter's wife, legally my daughter's daughter, emotionally, socially and in every possible way a child of this family. She smiles like my daughter, looks like my daughter-in-law, and explores the world like her unique self.

Sadly, she's in Bergen and I am in Copenhagen. That's however nothing new. My kids were born and lived in Bergen, while their grandparents lived in Ålesund and Oslo, a similar distance and a much longer travel time. I fly to Bergen for 400,- nkk and in 90 minutes. We used to pay what felt like a lot more while we had a lot less, to spend a night either on a train or on the coastal steamer, to get from Bergen in the days when we travelled with kids.

The real difference is in the day to day communication. My daughter keeps skyping us when she wants company - and we keep insisting that she skypes us. Or use google hang-out, or what ever other technology we have available. Sometimes it's my husband from one place, my daughter with her family, and me. And occasionally the uncle, our son, looking in from a fourth location. And then we chat, wave at each other, admire recent tricks and I sing, very badly, to the admiring audience who is my daughter's daughter. Internet, be happy you don't have to be part of those hang-outs.

The closest thing in the eighties was long and expensive phone-calls. The cost was a constant drain on a student economy, and the grandparents weren't all that interested in paying their end of it, so it would happen perhaps once a month. Then there would be the occasional letter. These were mainly in order to send pictures back and forth, and those were really expensive: film, process and copied, so there would be enough pictures for both set of grandparents, and then a hand-written letter in there. Yes, so much more exclusive and so much more labour-intensive, if you want to feel that communication matters. But also so rare, and so formal.

Now, I can watch that darling baby, as she listens to out-of-tune scales sung to her, and she tries to respond. It's almost enough to make me go pick up a little flute, to see her face when I play to her. It's a little marvel, and I get to enjoy it instantly. But it doesn't end there. My daughter and daughter-in-law got themselves a pretty good digital camera, and they use it frequently for little movies and a lot of pictures, posted to their pass-word protected weblog. I check my email only slightly more often. I get to see her grow, sometimes day to day, always once or twice a week, and I can comment, and then I get comments on the comments. All my colleagues know this, because it offers another benefit: I am ruthlessing making them admire the day-to-day development of this miracle of normal extraordinarity which is a grand-child.

I am still not sure if she actually responds to the person on the screen as a human being, or just odd sounds and images, but when I visit, she isn't afraid. It may be because I sound so much like my daughter, or she may actually get it - I am something familiar and non-threatening. It certainly makes me feel very close to them, to my children, their friends and loved ones, and now this little miracle of a girl. Not to mention the cat. It isn't the internet without a cat.

Of course, a lot of other things have changed too, from our parents' time to us. We are generally healthier and more fit. We have more education, and expect to be able to keep learning new things all the time. Education never ends these days, and communication technology changes so quickly, a constant stream of something new is the stable normality. Not all of the changes are necessarily to the better. It's important to learn to protect ourselves from the anxiety born of potentially constant connection. But when I log on to the little darling's blog and see a new picture of her crawling, chasing the tail of their cat, information technology is nothing but wonderful. I am a grandmother in the age of the Internet, and I love it.

13th day of Christmas

Also known as Epiphany, Three Kings Day, and the night before as the Twelfth Night, the 13th day of Christmas marks the end of the celebrations. Or, as my mother said: "13 dags Knut feier jula ut." I have no idea who Knut is or why he would sweep Yule out, but it's a good date for cleaning up.

And so I have been packing, sweeping, carrying and stashing ornaments all afternoon. This year the tree was tiny (by our standards), but I had to do all the packing up and carrying out alone, something I have never, ever done before.

This year, due to the size of the tree and the amount of ornaments I have collected in the 26 years we have been a family, we had our first dogma-tree. A dogma-tree is a tree with a topic, and the topic this years was birds. As some may see, there's a little bit more than birds there. We filled in with some stuff we pretented to be frost and icicles, and pine-cones. The real discussion was as to whether a butterfly can be said to be a bird, and does it belong on a pine-tree in December? The yes-side won, through a democratic process. A good thing we were an uneven number present during the decorating.

The first thing to get packed up was the second thing I put up: The advent wreath. This year's wreath had been lighting up the stairwell with it's overwhelming lights: shining, white roses. My sense of style is kicking my shin hard every time I am close to admitting that I actually love the string of lights in rose-shape, because they were a lot bigger and more prominent than I expected. But I will find a way to use them next year as well, if nothing else to honour my father, who more than anything loved colourful, abundant lights for Christmas. He'd have adored the roses, and might have wanted to keep them up all through the winter.

My favourite thing is the advent star. When you drive along the dark roads of Norway in the winter, often the only thing that lights the side of the road are the lights in the houses. Late, when all have gone to bed, there's not much, a few outdoor lights, a window where somebody are working late, the flicker of a television. But during advent, there are stars and seven-armed electrical "candlesticks" in every house, often several - one in the kitchen, one in the living room, one to the side... We use a very old real candlestick, from my husband's family, for the 7 candles and never in the window, but we always have an advent star. I have always loved the muted light of the star, and I sneak into the living room to turn it back on if my family have been sensible and energy-conservative and turned it off before going to bed. The soft light at night is the colour of expectations and secrets, and comes with the scent of cookies and the sound of sewing machines, of conversations I am not supposed to hear, and the memory of waking up really early to see how the rooms are transformed, night by night, into a nest of Christmas cheer.

But now it's over, it's all boxed up, the tree is in the yard, the star in the cabinet, the birds and the glitter packed down. Tomorrow I'll bring the last few cookies in to work, and then I'll make soup stock from the bone of the dried sheep leg (fenalår) I had for Christmas. It's over, until next year.

Summer!: Life in Copenhagen #9

(This was written 2nd of June and got stuck in the process.)

It's been almost two years. I have learned to ride my bike like a dane, which includes using the bell when the tourists wander into the bicycle lanes, to not worry if I haven't shopped for three days before a long week-end, and to call to talk to people in public offices, such as for instance the dreaded "skat", the tax department.

My language is changing, I am deliberately letting it slip into a more archaic form (to Norwegians archaic = Danish), and I am trying to decide which words may make it the easier for my students to understand me come fall. Some never will think I speak comprehensively, I know that, but I keep trying. I am practicing, in my head, to use "i" and "jer" rather than "dere" (which covers both in Norwegian), and "at" rather than "å". I have already given up words like "må" and "svært" due to its different emphasis in Norwegian and Danish, but I am keeping "enkelt". That one, my darling TAs assure me, is very easy to understand. It's "nemt", as they say. Hopefully, step by step, I will be able to lecture in a language a bit closer to Danish.

Until then, I take comfort in the fact that several of my students are willing to tell me, face to face, that they love the lectures. My Danish friends say Danes are introverts, reserved and uncomfortable with giving praise. I don't see that. My colleagues are warm, joyful, funny, and my students are interesting, challenging, polite, graceful and, surprisingly and extremely welcome, quite willing to thank me directly for the semester. I get that over and over again: "Thank you, for this term. It was a great class." Sometimes, even "it was the best class, the best class ever." I cherish that. It makes every exhausting lecture worth it, it even excuses what I do to my mother tongue.

But life is good outside of work too. The heat the last week has turned Copenhagen back to the city I fell in love with when I moved here. I wear sandals all the time, and have packed away most of the winter clothing. (OK, before I posted this, the weather turned COLD). I change into a T-shirt and work-out capris at home and just throw a thin top over for decency as I ride the bike to the Pilates work-outs. The ladies at Pilates cph deserve a mention. Perhaps even their own blogpost, soon. I started with Pilates years ago, but at home, from DVDs and books. It still helped, and as long as I managed to work out, my back gave me less problems. Then I found a teacher, for a day or two a week, in Ørsta. I loved it, but my schedule and hers made it less than efficient. Here, there are classes 6 days a week, all year, and I can schedule time online. This means, for instance, that even if I am travelling to Norway or Finland more than every second week since the beginning of April until the end of June, with a conference here in Denmark, I manage to get in two sometimes three work-outs a week. I have a long way to go to control a perfect "teaser", but I can get up into it, and hold it long enough to roll back down somewhat controlled, if I don't have to stay up there, showing off.

You might think I'd be more physically active in a place like Volda, where there isn't much else to do but hiking and living healthy. The truth is: I have had less pain since we moved to Copenhagen than I have had any other winter since 1985. And now it's warm, too, my muscles feel like butter, and I enjoy moving about, something I have rarely liked. Are there no problems? Oh yes, last week I was at a conference in Roskilde. Despite the effort, I never managed to get on the right train to get there on time. Partly it was me, not being sufficiently prepared - but how can I prepare for sudden 20-30 minute delays of the trains, and the chaos that is Nørreport station? The sudden heat caused the shoes that I had worn to work without incident just a week earlier to rub my feet raw, and the conference was on a topic I didn't know, leaving me to feel alienated and odd, like a giant dancing bear among all those tiny, serious women studying culture. After three days of heat, trains, Danish lunches and uncomfortable lecture-rooms I was physically wrecked.

Before that I had, for some reason, had 50 000,- dkk of "benefits" added to my income by the tax department. I was totally unable to track down where that had come in, as the electronic tax form didn't tell me. Hence, see the first paragraph. Mastering conversations on the phone with tax officials is vital. Also, the pollution worries me. I ride my bike to work and home through a cloud of exhaust, every day. I take some comfort in the fact that most of the time, I also ride up against a strong wind coming off the sea. I try not to think of what it carries with it from Germany, Poland and the other countries to the east and north.

And I miss the mountains. That plan I had: To sell Rotsethornet to Denmark, so we could have a bit more light? I still think it's a brilliant idea, but from the other side. Imagine how impressive it would have looked in Amager fælled? And imagine the opportunities it would have offered: just the resistance from the climb, the sensation of getting somewhere, getting up - yes, I miss it. But I'll go to the summer house this summer, live by the fjord, climb the mountains, curse the rain. I'll hurt, be cold and exhausted, and long for this little apartment right here, in the city.

Gratinert aubergine

This is a post directed to Norwegian friends and family, a favourite recipe that people ask for frequently. Here we go:

Auberginegrateng:

1 aubergine i skiver.
noe olivenolje (et par skjeer)
2 hvitløksfedd, hakket
ett lite glass hvitvin
en boks hermetiske tomater, hakket
en stor bunt basilikum
2 ts tomatpuré. Hvis du finner puré av soltørkede tomater er dette best. Kjøp et glass til meg også.
150 g ost - mosarella eller en annen norsk, mild ost som smelter fint.
salt og frisk kvernet pepper.

Damp auberginene til de er myke. Varm litt olje i en steikepanne og fres hvitløken ved middels varme. Skru opp varmen, tilsett vinen og kok litt inn. Skru ned varmen igjen og tilsett gomater, basilikum og tomatpuré, kok under lokk til sausen er tykk. Smak til med salt og pepper og hell sausen i en ildfast form (eler vent litt og legg det i lag). Legg aubergineskivene på toppen, pensle dem med litt olje, topp med osten. Bak i ca 30 minutt til osten er gyllen.

And if you wonder what recipe that is, I suspect it's the Italian Melanzane parmigiana.

Life in Copenhagen part 7: health and understanding

It's been a while since I wrote, and it's because I have been sick. Being sick in a new place and particularly a new country is scary.

The first signs arrived almost a year ago, when I was all alone in Denmark. Over the months I had some rather unsettling experiences. I noticed a lump where there shouldn't be one (spoiler: no, not cancer and nothing life-threatening), but I carefully ignored it for months. I really didn't want to know. But then I got an infection, fever and pain, and I had to go see a doctor. I ended up on antibiotics, stranded in my one-room apartment for almost two weeks. Part of the time I had fever fantasies, and some of the few experiences I had with contact to the world around me were truly surreal. Such as when the Norwegian culture-minister called, and I wasn't sure if it was a joke, a fever-fantasy, or reality. I asked her to call back after the antibiotics had time to work. She did.

Anyway: what I really want to write about here, is the part of Denmark that Norwegians think exist, but which tends to be absent, or just not seen, when we start living here.

You see, compared to Norwegian, Danish (the language) sounds gentle and warm. Danes appear to be touchy-feely and friendly, seen from the distance Norwegians tend to keep people at. Then we move to Denmark and figure out that no, it's not that simple. As a Norwegian living here, not just shopping in the large stores on Strøget or drinking in Nyhavn, we get ridiculed, cut off, excluded and ignored; due to the language difference. I felt like Denmark really didn't want me, yet another annoying non-dane here to make their lives more complicated. No matter that I am exactly the kind of person the Danish State wants: highly educated specialist in a field Denmark has prioritized for years - Denmark felt as cold as the record winter around me, except from a few friends and colleagues.

So, here I was, alone, feverish and lost, in this realm of Scandinavian distance and cold manners. That's when I suddenly started seeing the Danes as I had believed they would be. It started with the doctor: When she realised that it wasn't just a regular infection, she raced to the phone to find a specialist to see me right away! And she did, all the while doing her best to comfort me without saying anything either way. The specialist was busy, but warm, friendly and just as easygoing and nice as I used to think Danes would be. At the lab for the tests, while insanely busy, people were gentle, polite and smiling. And when I came to see my wonderful hairdresser after this rather shattering day, he looked me over once, and started spoiling me above and beyond what I could have asked for.

Best of all, through all of this, I was suddenly understood! For some reason, me being sick trumphed all language problems. And it continued. When I went to get food in one of the really fashionable take-aways in this area, the normally snotty staff took one look at me and became nice and understanding. When I was well again, this treatment disappeared. Then I went to the hospital for surgery, and suddenly it was right back again! Professional, busy and quick, yes, but also friendly, warm, polite and smiling.

It was a really weird experience. I don't know if it's possible to generalise from this, but I drew some personal conclusions.

1: Danes are as nice as we think, when we (the strangers) become an individual to them.
2: Pain and illness is a strong way of revealing our common humanity, both through empathy and through strength; it also allows others to make your life a little better, and people everywhere like to do a good thing for others.
3: The rest of the time, Danes are as busy and impatient as everybody else. Coming to Copenhagen was like moving to Oslo as a very green student from the west-coast, only worse. Soft wovels and polite phrases do not make people nicer, even if they sound like butter, cream and smiles.

All in all, it was a good experience. I know now that Danes can, when they need to, make that vital effort to connect, and so my own efforts at communication aren't necessary wasted either. Also, the Danish health system may be in crisis due to the state of the world economy, but I hardly think I would have been treated better if I had stayed in between the fjords in Norway. It's the general state of health-care systems to not have enough money, and I was in the somewhat strained, but still firm grasp of a Scandinavian welfare state. It feels familiar. It feels a little like... home?

Christmas spirit arrives digitally

This year the feeling of Christmas has been hard to achieve. But on Monday, suddenly, my daughter calls me. "Mom, did your present to your sister get lost?" "My what?" I respond, because I really wasn't thinking about Christmas presents. "It's on the internet, a present for her from you and dad." On the internet? WTF!?! What does the internet have to do with my presents? "A friend just mailed me," the girl continues, "she says that there's a list at posten.no, over lost presents at mail offices, and this one is in Bergen."

So online I go, hurriedly, ignoring my husband's demands to hear what's up, and yes, there it is:

Ikke typisk julegaveinnpakking, blekblått papir med mørkere tegninger av blader ca 12x9cm og ca 2cm tykk gave.Til/fra lappen er hjemmelaget i turkis papir, pyntet med gullfarget sløyfe i stoff.Kloke ord på innsiden av gavelappen

That's definitely my present to my younger sister, and it's fallen out of the envelope I had packed their presents in, at some mail office in Bergen. And so I hit the "send us a tip" button hard, hoping there's somebody at the other end to receive the message about the correct address. But then I start reading about all the other presents, and there's this image before my inner eye, of presents spilling out of bags and boxes, falling out of envelopes, condemned to an unsure fate at the mail offices all over Norway.

However, using the internet, the Norwegian mail has finally found a very sensible, loving use of the net and the social media. Somebody sits down and registers each present, and then you can look through the list, and if you see something you think you know you can tip the mail office, tip the person you think it's for or from, or just spread the message through facebook or twitter. "They sent you a present after all." There's a box of perfume. There's a soft present in star-splattered paper with a self-made snow-ball tag on it. There's something that looks like a book in blue and gold paper, from Maria to Elena. It's at the mail-office, and if you know Maria or Elena, you can help them and make sure their message reaches the destination. I love you. I care about you. I remember you. I took the trouble to find something for you, wrap it and send it, and I really hope it reaches you. And if the traditional channels are not good enough, I really hope somebody helps my message along, because I care, I do.

Merry Christmas!

----
Update: the mail office didn't register the "tips oss" tip, so I called them. After a few minutes I received a call back from a lady who was not at work at the moment, but she was willing to ask her husband, who also worked at the Norwegian mail, to find the present tonight, when he went to work, to make sure to deliver it. Talk about service and friendliness!

Christmas present tips for your geeky friend

I know what I want, at least: A very special memory stick! And if it's a girl geek and you want to say "I love you" in a suitably romantic way...

Or, if she's an academic geek, and happen to be exactly like me, then she wants to try out new software, or needs a new version of the old. Trust me, nothing says "I love you" like knowing exactly what software your favourite geek girl needs. Or do you want to impress? Go for something expensive!

IR 11.0 is over - thanks all

There should have been some kind of face-to-face debrief after IR 11.0, and I will at some point in the not too far future write the AOIR board with what I think they need to know (functionality of the conference organising system f.ex.,) but for now I'll just take it here.

As some noticed, I was extremely ambivalent on facebook before I went to Gothenburg. I was ambivalent in real life as well. Although some felt that there was good reason to criticize the decisions I had made about the schedule and the responses they got to their requests before the conference, neither decisions nor responses were based on lack of consideration. I had a certain number of rooms, a certain number of contributions, and a certain number of hours, and I had to make all of that sum up to a functional conference. However, the scheduling, gruelling work that it was, was just the tip of the iceberg. It covered the last 4 months of a one-year effort, an effort that started in October 2009.

This conference removed that already elusive concept "spare time," and even cut into the sacred raiding time. Rather than settling to blog, play with photos, write friends or chat, when I picked up the computer I'd start responding to emails or work on some conference detail. I am not whining. You see - I liked that. I got to write a lot of people I have not seen for years, people I have only read (about) and some total strangers who turned out to be extremely interesting scholars. What's not to like!

However, I did get tired. The last weeks before the conference I just had to give up on raiding all together, because with teaching and administration and the conference, I was working 10-12 hour days. Not quite that long weekends, but still, it's not like I followed regulations. And so, as the conference approached I dreaded it more and more, as the workload just kept increasing.

Then it started.

Most things went right. Some went wrong, and nobody could have done anything about it. (I am still really sad about Jon Bing being ill though. I think that was the biggest low of the conference.) Some were fixed before they went really wrong. But most of all, I loved the fact that people were happy there. The compact conference site, the excellent food and the work people put into their presentations and their research - as well as into each other - made it all work out surprisingly well. And the feedback afterwards still warms me, even if I was so spent at the banquet I couldn't even say thank you politely.



I am still proud of this plaque though, although I really don't know where to put it or how to deal with actually owning it. Makes for a fun conversation piece, and yes, it does warm, along with the praise on the aoir list and the twitter stream, now that I have realised the conference was a success!

First day at school!

I have worked here a whole week now, but still feel a little awed by this high-tech building, trying to get into being here. The place is empty and quiet during the holidays, and it's also opressively hot. So is all of Copenhagen though, it's really different for a poor Norwegian dumped here.

The reception was wonderful. Flowers, a grand tour with our appointed guides, and introductions all around. Another colleague started at the same time: Adriana Araujo de Souza e Silva. Coming from Brazil, I suspect she's more used to the weather here right now than I am. I'll have to show off my autumn survival skills later.

I am slowly getting my head around some of all the things that need to be set. So far it's running a lot more smoothly than when I went to Sweden, but that may be because I am more prepared for the difficulties of changing countries. The Danes seem more familiar though, than the Swedes - a bit more easy-going and less formal. I am sure I'll be clobbered over the head with differences any minute now, though. I have a new phone, a new account (no money yet though), a place to live and a vague map of the place in my head. For a woman who's used to navigating by "up" and "down" this "flat" is somewhat disturbing. I lose the sense of distance, and there appear to be no limits the the sprawl of the city.

One thing is very different. I have managed to get a tan. Now, if you live in a place on the planet where most of the time is spent avoiding the sun, you have no idea how different this is. But for us who are more familiar with full-body rain wear than with sunblock, a tan is something to be desired and cherished, both for the variation (for once, not vampire wannabe) and for the health effects. Sunlight can not only cause cancer, but also protect against it. At the same time vitamin D is vital to protect against a lot of other cancers. This last article is interesting, by the way, as it's questioning one of the great dietary myths: That of the benefits of polyunsaturated fats.

Finally research is starting to see what Scandinavians have known for ever: sunlight is good for your health. And so you'll find us on the beaches, at the pools, on verandas, in gardens, stripped of as much clothing as we can for decency remove, and ready to soak up those rays.

Me, I am still trying to get some things in place before I hit the beach. I will though, believe me, I will.

It feels final

It isn't, really, because I have a two year leave, leaving myself the option to turn around and come back to this hideout between the mountains. This hole, my sister so lovingly describes Volda as, and she's right, it is a hole in which to hide, a sudden green spot in between black mountains. And I have been crawling back into it over and over again over the last 19 years, hiding in between my expeditions into the world.

Somehow, living in Volda, the distinction between "real" and "virtual" world feels meaningless. What's real about living here? It's so secluded, so filled with its own rules, concerns and moving by its own rythm that living in the flesh world of Volda is like living in a virtual world. The insane beauty of the place, combined with the ruthless weather, the heavy darkness and the dreariness of the third month of rain and sleet, it turns Volda into something on the flip-side of other flesh world realities. At the same time - this is it. This is the reality, because reality is made up of a million little spots like this, places of heartbreaking beauty and equally numbing mundaneity, spread like random handfuls of marbles all over the planet.

The distinction between places is more than anything, a state of mind, and somehow I suspect the Volda state of mind won't stay behind. There's a tale in Norway, about the man who got into a fight with his house "nisse", the otherworld power living on his farm, traditionally bound to the land. At the end he gave up, sold the farm and moved. Among his stuff, however, the nisse was happily singing "we're moving today."

There are parts of Volda I hope I'll never leave behind. The easy assumption that people care, the sudden closeness in times of need, the long-term strategies to protect and care for the community, those are all some of the best qualities of small-town life. And there is a nisse I really hope doesn't come with me: the pettiness, the lack of generousity towards that which is unknown, the selfish scheming, the xenophobia. Sadly, I suspect that I'll find that wherever I go, that part of human nature was there before me.

As for the college? I have loved and hated this place for 19 years. I really need to work somewhere else, at least for a while, if I want to stretch and develop beyond my own comfort zone. But I am not fleeing. I am making a strategic move, keeping the lines of retreat open. Yep, sounds much better that way.

And now the bookshelves are slowly emptying. As I write, I have barely finished F. I have quite a few boxes to go. I'll get there though, and then me and my boxes and my past will move from this early-70ies built-quickly-and-cheaply crooked box into the glass-and-steel high modernity of ITU. Oh my.

Going to Denmark

When I started working in Volda in 1991, it meant moving towards where I grew up. The light, the air, the mountains, the language, it all resonated deeply with me, and I felt like coming home after years in Bergen. The kids would grow up with clean air and wonderful nature, in a small community where they had space to roam and where we felt safe about letting them take themselves about where they wanted - and where they knew where to find us, how, at all times of the day. It worked wonderfully for us all, but now they have moved out, my mother, who was an important reason to move to this area, is dead, and the only thing keeping us here is a too-big house and our jobs.

And now I am changing jobs. From the middle of July I will be at the ITU in Copenhagen, Denmark, working with so many wonderful people I have learned to know over the years. I will teach in a field more closely related with my research, and I will do my research around people who can both understand me and challenge me.

It's both a very sad and a very happy decision. I am leaving a place I have grown to know so well, taking the leap into the unknown, moving from the countryside to the city. At the same time I am going towards something I have wanted more and more over the last years, new challenges, new opportunities and, not the least, a change in problems. I am realistic enough to know that it won't be any easier to work in a new place, but I am looking forwards to some variety in my frustrations!

I still have some months left here in Volda, but the energy of the move is quite envigorating, and I am in some odd way both very much present here, and very preoccupied with the move.

Dear Amazon

You know I have loved you since I found you online. You have sated my reading lust and supported my academic struggles for years. I have browsed your pages and lusted for your offers, my wish-list is long and much larger than my bank-account, and in my shopping cart lurks desires I want to consume side by side with guilt about procrastination and lazyness.

But, dear Amazon - you are making life very difficult for me now. I was unhappy with you for a while, in Sweden, when you made me run around all of Umeå to figure out where you had sent my treasures. It was not a funny game, although it did make me ride my bike, through snow and wind, to new, remote places. Back home in Norway though, safely in Volda, I forgave you, because you delivered reliably again. I found my books in my mailbox or at the mail office, a healthy little walk away from home.

I think you know where this is going, though. Amazon, how could you? Suddenly, you are demanding that I take whole days off in order to receive that which I ask of you. You expect me to stay home, like a frustrated housewife, anxiously awaiting the pleasure of those who carry my books to me. Or, I have to ask that they are delivered to work, to be commented, studied and discussed by my peers. This is no longer what I thought it was to be! So, please remember this, my old love: Those are my books you are delaying. I have paid already as you send them, but you are slowing their trip to me through your poor choices of partners. I can change my mind, you know. I can take my wishlist elsewhere, directly to the publishers, or to competitors who deliver instantly.

I also haven't forgotten previous treachery. My patience is wearing thin, my passion is fading, but I still remember the love we shared in the past. You can still repent and return to better ways. Send my books by mail again, please? It is the best distribution system for private packages in Norway. The other systems are good for business transport, but I can't leave a lecture in order to sign for a box of science fiction books. I can't stay home a whole day just to indulge my taste for graphic novels. Please realise this, and give me the option to, perhaps, pay a little more for the transport I desire. It will be cheap compared to the inconvenience and the cost in work hours.

A bit of my past, to the highest bidder

When I was four years old, we moved from a cold, moist and unhealthy basement on a farm, to this house. The change was immense. Of course, for the first 20 years we couldn't afford to live in all of it, it had been designed for two families, and we rented half of it to students and tourists, depending on seasons. And so I had moved out before it was all "ours." Still, it's been the family house for almost 44 years, my father drew and built it for us, and the light of that house is part of my earlier memories. Nothing like falling asleep on the living-room floor, in the patch of sunlight from the large windows, when you're 6 years old and cold from a long morning of exploring what was at that time still open land between our house and the ocean. I was like a cat, soaking up the warmth, or perhaps a plant, embracing the light.

Now we are selling it. None of us have plans of moving back to Ålesund, even if we grieve as we let it go. I'll never live in a house like that again, the view, the light, the space... my parents had very few luxuries in their life, but they had Vindheim, and loved it with fierce passion.

Oh well. I can afford the luxury of nostalgia now, as we are selling, but I am not so well off that I can afford to indulge it. Good bye, Vindheim, and may some other little girl find out how warm and wonderful that spot on the floor really is. Mom and dad - don't make her go somewhere else with her toys, even if it is inconvenient. It's really the warmest, nicest place in the whole house.

Meta-blog post, since it's been a while

I am no longer blogging as actively as I did, and I am glad of it. As Alex Halavais predicted, in five years we'd be embarassed by having been really active bloggers. Well, it's not that bad, but I see that both my own writing and the structure from the technology has changed since 2001.

I blog more about events now, travels, conferences, meetings, and less commentary and opinions, also, a lot less from my private life. Oh, it's all still there, but it has changed, become toned down. Partly this is caused by a couple of rather upsetting events, where the weblog became focus for actions that spilled over into other media, and led to an overwhelming feeling of professional and personal isolation here, at this small college. I still don't think it was possible to avoid what happened, but I might have been able to do some more damage control. Or not. Who knows.

Also, my personal life is a lot more boring now. What do I do? I work, travel to conferences and occasionally on a vacation, and spend the evenings working, doingchores or playing WoW. Yes, I still do that. I tried to swap to Age of Conan, but the lag killed my interest. I just ordered Dragon Age, perhaps playing single-player games for a while will help. Also, I am healthier, the result of watching what I eat, working out and not obsessively writing a book or thesis, and plain health is boring. I don't even have anything to whine about. From January I'll also be free of the administration of the PR, communication and media education (new name since this autumn), which will hopefully lead to more time for reflection and creativity around the topic of social media. The dean wants me to plan a couple of courses as a start. I'd like that, to be able to teach what I research.

And I think facebook has changed my blogging, too. A lot of the general commenting and tracking has moved from here to there. Oh, and then there's the forskning.no weblog, where I put the more researched blogposts on games. It's in Norwegian, so I don't double post it. Now, considering, that's too bad. I should at least link those posts.

Anyway, that's what's going on here. I am not going to promise the posting will pick up. I am actually quite happy with my online/offline balance at the moment.

Me, feminism, again

I was asked to be part of a panel with a group of wonderful scholars, all female, for a conference next year. It was a very flattering request, and, weak soul that I am, decided that I wanted to be part of it the moment I read "I have been teaching your work." I mean - somebody uses my work in classrooms. Gosh, that's as close to immortality as I ever expect to come.

Anyway, I dawled a little over the response, because I am always stunned when I find that people think of me as a feminist. I think I am just a humanist, a person who happens to be female, but who cares about the system within which we all live. I think of my work not as restricted by gender or viewpoint, I am studying players and I study them independent of their gender. At the same time I am very aware that gender influences them, as players, and it influences me, as a researcher.

In a way, when I see myself presented as a feminist scholar I have a flashback to a conversation with my daughter. Her teacher had rounded on her saying "you, who are Torill's daughter, can't have such ignorant opinions of gender!" My daughter was truly upset, because she didn't understand what she had done wrong. It took a long conversation to try to make sense of it. Our final conclusion was that my daughter's role models as a woman are me and my four very strong sisters.

What do the other four do? One runs a successful export/import firm, another has an expanding business of design and craft on top of teaching, one is a well respected artist, and the fourth has her heart and attention on leading live-action role-play games, one of the few female GMs in Norway. We always did what we wanted, despite gender, class, culture, economy, ethnicity and geography working against us. Actually in that mix of obstacles we ignored, gender was just another issue. Between the five of us, my bright and wonderful daughter had never even considered that she couldn't do just what she wanted.

By the time my daughter and I had come around to that, we had agreed that yeah, we were feminists, because if we were to isolate gender from the rest of the soup that influences humanity, then we were definitely, she and I, on the feminist side. We just were a little handicapped when it came to seeing the specifically gender-related topics.

Now, I'd be a bad feminist if I didn't tell you about my son and how he taught me about gender studies. You see, he is the one who dwells on gender issues, explores the limitations and affordances of masculinity, questions, criticizes and discusses them. But that's for some other time.

The burden of the past

In New York I went to MoMA, where Beijing based artist Song Dong has an exhibition called "waste not" this summer. In this work he celebrates the values of past generations, by offering to our curious eyes that which is today considered waste.

Pieces of fabric used for clothes, saved in case of patches or alterations, old shopping bags, a broken kitchen oven, bottles, jars, boxes, ribbons, worn shoes, the exhibition was a large display of what you can find when you empty a house after the passing of its inhabitant, particularly if it was one of the thrifty ones of older generations.

This week my sisters and I have been looking through the relics of our mother, slowly sorting through her treasures. Modern-day women as we are, we are throwing it all away, wasting, as her treasures have been going to waste over the last 20 years. But each piece has its own history, poignant reminders of our past. And it's not just that we recognize the curtains, the old clothing, the boxes and bags, but we all know how it could have been used. We spent long hours cutting the old clothing into material for rugs, we made a lot of our own clothes and clothes for each other, we knitted, and remember the many spools of yarn - what they were used for, and what they were supposed to be used for. We know the year the old marmelade was made, we know the pieces of wood and the materials, and even the many rocks of our mother's collection for the hobby she wanted to engage in, cutting and polishing stones, are objects wose potential we know. This house was one of activity, of reclaiming the broken, the torn and the spoiled as well as of creating new things from nothing. The garden is a powerful reminder, even in its neglected state it hides secrets of herbs, berries and salad leaves.

Now we are carrying all of this away, throwing it out, and even in this context I choose for display a picture which does not fully display the disorder, the sad state of all these resources from the past. It helps, as I do this, to think about the exhibition at MoMA, which somehow prepared me for this process. My mother could have filled that museum floor with all she had stored up. And oddly, I wish I could have shown it to her, let her see how stored resources can be both trash and art at the same time.

I suspect the rest of my life will be filled with moments like this one, when I wish I could have shown this or that to somebody I have lost. It's part of still being alive.

Orient Point

After an exhausting spring, I am having something odd called "vacation". You know, when you're not making excuses for all the things you haven't gotten around to doing yet, and you only need to do the things you feel like doing.

Anyway, what I felt like doing today was to go for a bike ride from Greenport, where I am currently staying at a motel which feels overpriced in this crappy weather, but which I guess would feel cheap if I was lazing in the sun instead of uploading pictures to Flickr on a weak wireless signal

(lovely beach site, fantastic view of the water, big room and immensely comfortable porch). The goal was Orient Point, the easternmost point of the north fork of Long Island.

At the point of the fork, there's a ferry going to New London,

and that's where I went on this rather exhausting ride. The bike I had rented had seemed fine the day before, but what is OK for a 3 km ride from Greenport to the motel, becomes exhausting when we're talking 30 kilometers. Oh well, I got my exercize in today, that's for sure!

On the way, I passed some wonderful spots, a couple of nature preserves with a fishing egret and an osprey's nest,

a public beach which was closed at the time (I find "closing" a beach slightly absurd, but Americans obviously don't),

and several very american buildings. Not American in an overblown, overexclusive, "everything is bigger and better" way, but lovely pieces of Americana - intricate patterns on railings and beneath roofs, comfortable, wide porches with chairs and decorations, beautiful windows. There's a love of decoration and a surplus of time and skill which comes out in these incredible details to small and big houses alike, and definitely in their churches.

Slowed shock

12 days ago my mother died. When I learned of her death, I sat there, expecting a jolt of some kind. Nothing happened. Then I started taking action. Apart from the persons who found her, two of the wonderful neighbourhood ladies who looked in on her after they started worrying, I was the first to get the message. I had to talk to a lot of people very fast, then figure out what to do about the practical issues surrounding a death.

It's not something you can rehearse. It's not something I had researched. Even now, when it's all done, I shy away from it. I don't want to remember the details of what I needed to deal with.

My mind is very busy shying away from topics right now. It knows there is this big minefield, and stepping into it needs to be done carefully. I loved my mother, but I was also incredibly angry with her. Much of that anger was justified, but now I can let it go.

All of this takes time, my mind tells my brain. The brain wants to get on with things. I have always had an impatient brain. But the mind has a - well - can a mind have a mind of its own? Not really, huh? Anyway - I want to move on, but since I am moving through this mindfield of issues that slip into the past with each step, everything is slowed down.

And that's actually what I was getting to today. Just takes some time to get there.

So, this post is to tell people who wonder why I am extremely passive and out-of-the-loop that no, I am not that passive, I have this mindfield I need to walk through. I am ok. Just slow.

(And yes, at first it was a typo. But sometimes my fingers are smarter than me. It is a minefield of the mind.)