50/50

I, who have tried so hard to learn Icelandic, just find it a crack up to see all the American slang that gets an Icelandic spelling once it enters the parlance here. I love hybrids, that is all there is to it, I love hybrids.  This week's list: kúl móv, mæspeis, fésbók, fokking, júsjúal söspekts

It is almost impossible to overstate the degree of cultural difference between Iceland and the United States generated by the simple fact that the U.S. has a military, and Iceland does not. One reason I prefer living in Reykjanesbær is that I feel less of a need to apologize for that fact here than I would elsewhere in Iceland. Because as it so happens, I would not exist, I would never have been born, were it not for the U.S. Military. This does not mean for one minute that I support everything they have done or everything they are doing. But it does mean that I tend to see the military not as an abstraction, the evil "military industrial complex," but rather as an organization made up of individuals, with all the good and bad incumbent in any human endeavor. With the power to obliterate whole nations comes the responsibility not to do so, and I like to believe they (usually) know that. Not that I'm trying to apologize for them, or anything.  

A neighbor of mine in Southern California used to sell glass Christmas ornaments, and I always liked to save up some money as a child so I could buy a few every year. I liked the bells and the angels, and I also liked the glass icicles, how they would catch the colors of the Christmas lights. It was not until I was in my early 20s that I saw an actual icicle, made out of ice, during a ski holiday. Today there is a row of gigantic icicles hanging off my roof, right over my front door. I might be a bit afraid of them, actually, if they weren't so beautiful.  

When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, my family was an anomaly in too many ways to even begin to explain, but one thing that stood out was that there were 4 kids, all full blood relations, my sister and I and our two brothers. I guess this is one reason The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe was one of our favorite books. Anyhow, we were the only family I knew with so many kids; some of my friends were only children, but most families had two kids, and a very few had three. I knew no one else where there were 4. Here in Iceland, that isn't so unusual at all. My mom grew up in a family of 4, two boys and two girls, and I have several Icelandic friends with families of a similar make-up. And with half-siblings and the like, Icelandic families tend to be even bigger than that. That is so nice, so comforting, but it does make me miss my siblings terribly.  

I am always interested to note which foreign news stories get picked up by the Icelandic media. This story of a study from Newcastle, England made it into the Icelandic news , and I note that unlike the American press, which might make light of such a story, this actually resonates with a serious academic article published in an Icelandic journal recently about cow-naming conventions. This is important stuff in a country rather dependent on dairy products. 

It is a beautiful morning here in Iceland.

Despite the recent change in government here in Iceland, the problem of rampant unemployment will, of course, not be fixed in one fell swell swoop. It will take time, a few folks getting employed here or there, before the workforce is back in full swing. We at Vikingaheimar plan to do our part, since we'd like to get people on the unemployment list to come help us build a new Viking ship, maybe even two or three.  And I heard recently from my cousin the  mathematician that actually, unemployment in the United States is worse than in Iceland or in Europe, but they have a different way of accounting for it, so that it isn't quite as obvious.     

My friend Thordis makes some very good points in her comment to my previous entry, and I think she is absolutely right. Icelanders care a great deal more about each other and about what is going on in their country than someone like me, who is used to living out my life in perfect anonymity, can quite appreciate. This is one reason, though, that I hope to be able to stay, in hopes of gaining that same feeling of community. 

I have to say, ever since Tuesday, when the compounding cascade effect started after the Parliamentarians refused to meet while protests raged outside their doors, it has been so exciting to be here in Iceland, to watch the collapse of a government. I've never seen anything like it. These things do not happen in the United States; even when George Bush was at 23% approval ratings, he was still our President, no one was calling for impeachment (and only a few left leaning Berkeley types even did so after no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq). Nope, we stay loyal, stick it out until the next election. Here in Iceland, there seems to be more of a sense that the government only gets a few chances to get it right, and then the people give up on them and they have to leave. Being a Libra, I can only say that I see the benefits of both approaches. But being an American, the first seems much more comforting to me, less of an us-them dynamic. Afterall, it's a democracy, not...

For hours now, there has been a steady howling outside my door, as the wind whips around the building. I remember this sound from when I was a child in California, and the Santa Ana Winds (also known as the Devil Winds) would swoop down from the mountain side. 

The announcement this morning that the Financial Minister and the leadership of the Financial Oversight Committee here in Iceland will step down is rather too late to really appease the protestors, and will probably instead fuel their fire. I must say, the whole thing reminds me of what happened with Donald Rumsfeld back in 2006. Instead of stepping down before the election, when it might have actually helped George Bush, he decided to step down the day of the election, when it was a meaningless gesture, politically speaking. It was as if he really did not want to help the President at all.  

Last night, I went bowling in Keiluhöllir, a place so completely modeled after similar facilities in the United States that the computer graphics and the shoes all come from America. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be speaking English there with my Commonwealth friends.  This morning, I called the priest for Keflavíkakírkja, Séra Skúli, so he could express kveðju from my mother at the funeral for Guðrun today. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to call him, the priest that baptized my son, and who I ran into up at Skalholt one summer Sunday. We always speak Icelandic. 

The fresh snow enticed me to take a bit of a drive on my way into the office, out the road to Reykjanes Víti. Past Hafnir and in the midst of the empty hraun, I turned onto a little road I´d always meant to drive down but did not know what was at the end. There were some other tracks there as well, not many, maybe one or two cars had driven there before me, so it seemed an OK idea, even without my snow tires. The road was not very long, or too twisty, and about half-way through, the view opens up onto the ocean; I could see huge waves crashing on the black rocks in the distance. As I went through the gate, I realized this was a private road, but it was too late to turn around. And I was happy I didn´t, because at the end of the road, on a small rise stood a loan wooden summer house, with a horse grazing nearby, and two people painting the window sills. All of Iceland looked different after that.

One summer here in Iceland while camping, a group of us kids were scaling up a cliff-side beside a waterfall, where there were some small birch trees and shrubs. Grabbing hold of one of these to hoist myself up, I instead uprooted the tree, and it came tumbling down on top of my cousin, who then fell and hurt her ankle. I learned then that is important to look carefully at the roots and soil around a tree, before deciding to use it as a climbing aid. A few summers later, I was in California, at an outdoor shopping mall, waiting in line with my friend and her father to get tickets for something or another. It was hot and we were bored, so I decided to climb one of the tall sycamore trees growing in the middle of the parking lot. All good fun, until I went out onto the limb. It gave way beneath me, and I came crashing down onto the asphalt. I must have been unconscious for quite some time; when I awoke, there were firemen, an ambulance, and lots of onlookers, all wondering if I was OK. I...

I am absolutely certain that I have 100% adjusted to Icelandic time before, I mean I must have, I have been going back and forth like this for well over a year. But I don't really know how I managed it before. I think maybe I was more disciplined about forcing myself to get up or go to bed, or just more resigned to slog it through my days, slightly disoriented. This time around, though, I seem to be taking up the example of some friends of mine, and realizing that here in Iceland, it is OK if one's work day goes from 11am until 8pm, if that is how you want to do it. I really don't need to force myself into a 8 to 4 work day, it isn't like I work in some draconian office or something. The work getting done is what matters, not that I fall into some arbitrarily decided time frame for doing so. I guess I'm in my own little time zone, one in between Iceland and California. Hope I can stay, I actually like it here.   

There is simply no comparing skyr to any other dairy product anywhere in the world, let alone in the United States. It is full of vitamins and protein but low in fat, good for everyone from a young child to an ailing diabetic, fulfills all dietary requirements. A miracle food really. Plus, just a few bites of it, and a person is full for hours and hours. People who are really worried about the depression ought not be; as long as skyr is around, there is no chance that people here in Iceland are going to starve.  

My friends and I on Facebook have started gathering together some of the more awful things we've said while trying to stumble our way through Icelandic. "I'd like some god-damn bread" instead of "I'd like whole wheat bread," or "My son has AIDS" instead of "My son has allergies." Mine are too innumerable to try to keep track of, but one of the ones I feel the worst about was when my cousin had us out to her summer-house, had really gone out of her way to make a beautiful spread of all kinds of things to eat, and when I was leaving I said, "I'll get back at you for this" when what I meant was "I hope I can return the favor." Thankfully, she is a really sweet person, and I have no doubt she understood.  

I woke up with no plans at all today, but as often happens here in Iceland, it looks like my whole day is already taken up. 

I am really sorry to report that an American friend of mine, who had decided to move here to Iceland all on her own and to begin a new line of work, is going to have to go back to New York. She is the first real victim of the financial collapse here that I know of personally, and it is especially ironic because now she'll have to go back to reporting on financial matters, the very thing she was trying to escape, instead of reporting on the environment, an issue she really cares about. I think it is just a shame, since it seemed like such a good idea, to try something new. But it also means that somewhere lurking in the images of Iceland abroad is the idea that it, and not the United States, is the land of opportunity. And it also means that I really ought to make sure I get some work done. Bless í bilið.

When I started this blog, I did not realize it would turn into an extended exegesis on metaphors. But that seems to be what has happened, mostly because I still think in English. So, for instance this evening, during a telephone call, I thought, "Time to get off my high horse." A great metaphor, based on the historic fact that overbearing generals rode on taller horses than everyone else in the Civil War. I do not believe there is an Icelandic equivalent, since here, none of the horses are particularly tall.