50/50

Although this is a function of the specific feeds I have chosen to follow, I have observed that Icelanders are much funnier on Twitter than Americans are. Americans tweet their opinions on political matters in categorical, condemnatory terms, or they use Twitter to bolster their professional expertise, a la LinkedIn. So kudos to the Icelanders for understanding the potential of the medium and maximizing it.

For the last few days, the sky here in the San Francisco Bay has been filled with smoke, blown this way from a fire 100 miles away. At least 40 people died in that fire, a whole town destroyed, and many others missing. One reporter described the sky over the town as raining down ash. On this day, the 100 year anniversary of the end of World War I, the news in the US is filled with stories of the man who calls himself President, unwilling to step out into the rain to lay a wreath. Unwilling to partake in our communal, world wide weep. And I'm thinking about my trip to Iceland on Thursday, of the carbon dioxide the plane will be spewing into the sky. My third round trip from SF to Iceland this year, and I don't have anyway to make up for my carbon footprint. But in all honesty, I'm also wondering how bad the weather will be, if I'll have to be out braving wind and snow for the shot the documentary film maker wants, of me walking around outside. Will the landscape reme...

I completed my second round trip flight to Iceland of the summer on Wednesday, which is a new record for me. I usually try to keep my carbon-footprint from international flights down to one a year, although I know there have been times when it has been twice a year. Just not usually within three weeks of each other to the same destination. Clearly a very silly plan. One of those four flights was on WOW Air, and I'm very glad that was not on the return flight home yesterday. It is of course a recognized business strategy of low-cost airlines that after you buy your ticket, they subsequently charge you for absolutely everything, and although I knew that, I must say it surprised me that this extended to getting water on board. I sort of thought they were legally required to at least give people water. But nope, you have to pay for that too. But the biggest surprise is that although the plane was new and fancy, there was no entertainment console. Flying back and forth to Iceland is...

One of the linguistic quirks that one might even call a dialectical distinguishing mark for Californians is that we put a The in front of road names. To demonstrate this in a sentence: Last night I was driving on the 80 through the Sierra Mountains. Which is also a true sentence, not just a linguistic utterance. It is also true that I was very grateful to have had six years of driving in Iceland, and up and down Reykjanesbraut, to boost my confidence while navigating the 80 in the midst of a snowstorm. I suspect there are also Reykjavík dialectical markers. I' reading an Icelandic book right now, which means I occasionally encounter words I don't know.  All the words ive needed to look up have not been in the dictionary.  The author is either using such modern Icelandic that it isn't in the dictionary, or making words up a la Laxness, or speaking Reykjavíkese.

My new job does not afford me much time to maintain my blog, nor keep up with news in Iceland. But with a sore throat and stuffy head, I've been home for two days now resting, catching up on some reading and writing. Reading an article for peer review related to the sagas, and writing script about the Norse gods. That is a happy beginning to the new year for me. And I'm happy to report that there is now available at the stores in the U.S. a product called "Icelandic Provisions". It is skyr, and comes in a nifty square container, unlike all the other yogurts in circular shapes. I'm digging it. OK, well, more important than the packaging is that it actually tastes like Skyr! I applaud Siggi for trying his healthy weird skyr like thing in the stereotypical round container, but I am so glad that a more authentic product is on the market. I think MS Mjolk owns it, and I am very glad they have figured out a marketing strategy that allows their products to reach U.S. c...

I started work at the Los Altos History Museum on Monday, which is a few miles away from Stanford University. Stanford used to have a professor of Old Norse literature, and a very distinguished one at that. But about a decade ago that went poof! And they have never replaced the position. So I guess I'll be going to Berkeley for Old Norse lectures.

I don't know when the clocks will officially spring forward, but for me it's two weeks from now, when I start my new job. I'm saying goodbye to academia, and to Scandinavian studies, for awhile at least, working on my leadership and management skills, as well as exhibit skills, at a dedicated museum. Should be a good change, and I'm happy and excited to be getting back to California, and back to my son. I've been away too long. I've been happy and confident and relaxed about beginning a new phase of my life, although tonight I feel a bit melancholy. I guess the part about not having any professional reason to go to Iceland ever again is kind of weird for me. I was realizing last night that as I fall asleep, I'm often visualizing myself wandering alone around the streets of Reykjavík. I spent a lot of time doing that when I lived in Iceland, and some of the time I was crying. As I am now.

Well it is 8 days into the Trump administration, and it already feels like years. Years living in some sort of bizarre alternative reality. Things are not unfolding as I would have wanted them to, not by a long shot, for the country as a whole. Day to day for me personally, life goes on as if none of this madness in Washington matters. But it does matter. Immigrants stopped at the airport, subjected to confusing interrogations. Our international obligations to care for families and the environment, to expand economic opportunity, tossed out the window. Wow, it is just so dumbfoundingly stupefying. The waste of it all, watching potential evaporate minute by minute, but in slow motion, as if it were taking days, weeks, months and years. And having no way to turn back the hands of time, to undo this disaster. Under Obama, it seemed the emerging global world was on the verge of environmental and economic responsibility and justice. I miss that feeling. And I'm ...

It is Day 5 living within the new administration. And I just finished reading Mostly Harmless, the fifth in a trilogy by Douglas Adams. It seems apropos, in this world of "alternative facts."  What we have learned so far is that the media, whose function in a democracy had been very robust, is now relegated to only saying nice, friendly, positive things. Under the new administration, dissent is not popular or appreciated. But congratulations will be accepted. Ah yes, Mostly Harmless. I just found out that my oldest brother, Billy, who passed away while I was living in Iceland, was a huge fan of Douglas Adams. His birthday was on Sunday, and I lit a candle for him at church. I don't know if his soul is anywhere in particular these days, or if prayers can do anything to rescue lost souls, but I do hope he is resting in peace. When he was alive, he brought much joy into our lives. And no matter what, the planet is going to be removed by the Vogons soon enough.

Today there was another "terrorist attack" at a university in the United States. A young man from Somalia drove his car into a crowd of people, then jumped out and stabbed several others with a knife before the police shot him. Using one's car as a weapon appears to be a new terrorist tactic, at least it is similar to what was done in Paris over Bastille Day. And he's Muslim; he'd been quoted in the school paper saying how hard it was for Muslims to find a place to pray at the university a few months earlier. A friend of mine works at The Ohio State University, where this attack took place. She and I went to Berkeley together, we both studied Old Norse. She wrote her dissertation on the figure of Odinn as a "guest" in several different genres of Old Norse literature. She's more of a folklorist, interested in the subconscious and symbolic, whereas I am more interested in human-material interactions. I felt really bad for her today, what a terrible t...

This summer I took my son to Icelandic Camp in Gimli Manitoba. It was my first time in "New Iceland". I had an amazing time and met some very nice people - even went sailing out on Lake Winnipeg with two sisters raised in the area that spoke Icelandic as their first language. It was really fun hearing their dialect, slightly different than modern Icelandic. That, plus the Icelandic flags, vineterta in the bakeries, and murals depicting the Icelandic settlers arriving all made me feel like I was somehow in Iceland. There was even a pub in town called the Ship and Plow I went to one night, with a huge Icelandic flag signed by all the people who had been at the pub to watch the Icelandic national team defeat England in the Euro Cup. It was like I'd found an Iceland I could drive to! But then I started to notice a few things. Like the fact that the camp was at the Ukrainian park, and that the chef was Ukrainian, not Icelandic. And at the pub, I didn't meet any Icelander...

So, I haven't blogged in a while, or been keeping up with the Icelandic news much. But I must say I am a bit pleased that US politics aren't the only ones in a bizarre post-election limbo land. The Icelandic situation of not being able to form a coalition government is intriguing. How long until a government is formed, and will the resulting cabinet be as mish-mash-apple-sauce as whatever blob is emerging from Trump Tower? I don't know, but I am morbidly curious to witness this slow train wreck. I was looking back through some old blogs, and discovered it was in August of 2015 that I posted about why Donald Trump might just become the next President of the United States. How very weird that looks to be what is actually happening. It still does not feel real. And there are still several scenarios that might stop it from ever really happening, such as a recount effort in several key swing states, the threat of some rogue Electoral College delegates s...

It's so interesting to be here in the Faroes, realizing this is what hundreds of thousands of years of waves and rain can do to a landscape. And this summer I learned that stretching from Canada to Texas used to be an ocean. It's humbling to realize just how insignificant we really are in the scope of things.

When I was a child, I spent many of my summers in Iceland, and much of the time during those summers at my amma and afi's house in Keflavík, on Suðurgata. My mother never identified with that house much, since her parents bought it after she married my dad and moved to the States. Instead, in her mind her childhood home is on Solvallagata. Still, when her parents died, they willed the house to all four of their kids, my mother included. Parents do this often in wills, think somehow that one house can be split between four people, but that never works in reality. In this case, it is even less practical, because my mother's brother actually lives in the house. And he was able to arrange it so that his other siblings ceded their parts to him. So now he claims 3/4 of the house. My mom has had her 1/4 for years now, and has even helped pay for repairs, etc. But she has never taken any advantage of it, well, except in 2006, when we had Palmer's baptism party in that house. ...

Iceland has gotten progressively more international and diverse in its food selection over the years, and this trip, it was particularly noticeable. The first two nights I was in town, I stayed with my relative Þórdís in Keflavík, and the first night, I brought home Thai food from my favorite restaurant in Keflavík, named, not surprisingly, Thai Keflavík. The following night she brought home one of her favorite dishes, a ready-made Chinese duck with mooshoo pancakes that I think she got at Nétto. I then migrated over to my friend Sigrún's house in Reykjavík, where she was kind enough to have made a full Icelandic leg of lamb dinner for me, along with these amazing rolls she learned how to bake in England. The next night Sigrún and I went out to Serrento's for dinner, which we both thought was going to be Italian pasta but it turned out to be Mexican food, I had a quesadilla. But it was back to Asia for dinner on Tuesday, first having Sushi in Kópavogur with my relative Bryndís...

I saw the Northern Lights briefly during my trip to Iceland, dancing there in the corner of the sky. I didn't get a picture of it, seems almost disrespectful to try to limit a miracle of nature into something so mundane. I have been awed by the moon on its own sometimes, and when the stars are shinning bright they are wonderful to behold. But there is nothing in the entire world quite like the delicate interplay of green and blue moving seamlessly, wordlessly as one, across the heavens, oblivious to their power to transfix everyone around them.  The first time I saw the Northern Lights, I was totally overwhelmed. I remember standing outside, completely mesmerized. And afterwards I cried, and I was shaking. Honestly, the experience was so overpowering that the idea for instance of taking a Northern Lights tour created an anxiety, a fear in me. I didn't think I could handle it, not in any kind of public setting. So intense, so personal, so beautiful, I'd just be an em...

When I was in Iceland last week, I spent a lot of time in Víkingaheimar and talking about Víkingaheimar with the people now running it and others that know it well. The history of Víkingaheimar, some of the things that didn't happen and the things that did happen, is not a completely happy one, and it was especially unlucky to try to open just after in the the Kreppa struck. And there are a lot of things unknown about the future of Víkinaheimar, who is going to do what and what changes are going to happen both inside and out. But I was very happy about two things. First of all, I was happy about how I felt walking into Víkingaheimar. You never know how you are going to feel until the exact moment when you are there, and my emotions could have been anywhere on the spectrum from upset and angry to not caring to annoyed. But instead I was just genuinely and spontaneously happy, and it felt good that I was that engaged, that I am not so scared as to be cut off from feeling happy. I...

While I was in Reykjavík, I was fortunate to get to stay with my artist friend, Sigrun Lara Shanko. I first got to know her silk work because it was Viking inspired, with runic texts and images of Viking Age artifacts painted in muted colors on  smooth silk, imported from China. It was impressive work and it sold well at Víkingaheimar. But I'm very glad she switched over to making wool rugs. They are dominated by undyed, muted colors, grey, black and white but with lines of color weaving through, inspired by the Icelandic landscape. Like deep blue rivers running through ash-laden valleys or molten lava inching down a hillside, hard and black on top, red underneath. The hints of color in a neutral setting are so alluring: the blues mesmerize you like the eyes of your lover, the only thing you see in a room of 200 people, the deep reds reach out to you and hug you even when hanging in the farthest corner. It's amazing. Her rugs are made out of pure Icelandic wool, so they are...

Up on Ásbru, the new name of the former NATO Base, where my parents met and where I used to live, is a car rental company called Sad Cars. That's where I got my dented, rusting, 1998(?) green Yaris. The back windshield wiper doesn't work, and it has no hubcaps, and it has a vague oily smell after it's been driven for a whole, and there is a funny noise if you break while turning. I guess that's why it's a sad car.  It's OK, I'm sad too. 

I hope my readers will forgive me for being so tardy in blogging. Let's just say it isn't a good idea to travel with two deadline projects back home left unfinished. After sleeping in past breakfast time at the hotel this morning (I had been awake working until 5am and then finally fell asleep hard), I salvaged what I could of the day by walking over to the island where the Nordiske Museet, Skanse, and Vasa Museum are located. I was very glad a museum colleague of mine had recommended I see an exhibit at another museum, called Liljevalchs. It is was a bit further down the path but well, well worth it. The exhibit is called Utopian Bodies, which is a very intersting way to think of clothing, as our idealized self. The exhibit, which took over the whole museum, had all sorts of complex philosophical ideas about dystopias and Utopias, about technology and sustainability, and about conformity. But my two favorite galleries were the last two, one dealing with Judith Butler and gen...