50/50

I know I posted on facebook about this band before, but I don't think I have blogged about it. I was first introduced to this band by my parents, who were introduced to it by my cousin Sverrir, who was living at my parent's house while working on his pilot's license late last year. The reason Sverrir is such a big fan of the band is that his little brother, Brynjar, is in the band. So that means my cousin is in the band that won last year's best new band contest in Iceland, and whose band, Of Monsters and Men, now has a US tour lined up . My mom is going to one of their concerts in West Hollywood next month, and told me to fly down and join her, but I don't think that will work out. Instead, the next time I hear the band on a radio station here in California, I won't just think cool that they are from Iceland, I will think hey that's my cousin! Ok, 3rd cousin, but whatever. (His great grand mother and my great grandmother were sisters, and his great grandmot...

I did not watch the Emmy's, the awards ceremony for the television industry. But I did watch the Oscar's last night. And I was struck by the commercials that were on during the Oscar's. There were a whole series of ads featuring Ellen Degeneres for JC Penny, which has a new campaign about simplifying the shopping experience: no more gimmicy 6am sales, no more hassles with returns, no more snotty sales clerks. I rather like JC Penny, and so I rather liked this new marketing campaign. And I certainly liked the ads for JC Penny much more than the ads for the television shows. The Oscar's were broadcast on ABC, so ABC used some of the commercial spots to promote their own programming. One show in particular kept getting promoted, something called GCB , which I understand stands for Good Christian Bitches. From the ads, the show features a group of women who regularly attend church in Texas, for the sole purpose of being able to say mean and nasty things about one anothe...

Down at the Starbucks around the corner from Palmer's school, where I am spending my morning, I happened to notice the plum trees and the cherry trees are already in bloom.

When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, many years ago in my early 20s, I managed a cafe that had about 15 employees, almost all of them students at Berkeley like me. It is amazing to me how well I remember their names and their faces, even to this day. I took the responsibility of managing them really seriously, and remember with some horror the one time I did not check up on the morning crew, only to discover later that day they had failed to bake the bread or make the soup. Lunch time that day was disastrous, needless to say. And I really felt it was my fault, for not coming to check in on how things were going; instead I was at home studying for a midterm. Anyhow, one of the girls working there was named Emilia, she was from Los Angeles. Not one of the suburbs of Los Angeles, but from downtown Los Angeles. She was Hispanic, and very Catholic. She was a good worker, very sweet, and I liked her a lot. So I felt pretty bad one Wednesday when she came into work, and I said to her ...

Well Palmer and I are heading up to the mountains and I am looking forward to getting out of town and hopefully getting in a better mood, after a hard day. My students were uncooperative and I still have a cold. But mapping my route, I see there is tons of stop and go traffic. This never would have happened in Iceland.

Today KQED public radio had a program dedicated to online dating, especially to the problems with algorithms used to pair people with their ideal match. It was a very interesting program, but I missed getting to call in. I was going to ask if there have been any studies of people who get addicted to looking at profiles and chatting people up, but never actually going through with setting up face to face meetings. Just trolling online dating sites for the heck of it.

My parents have always enjoyed getting the annual newsletter from the Arctic Studies Center, the office of the Smithsonian where I used to work. My former colleague there, Igor Krupnik, used to say about the newsletter, which often got up to 36 pages, "never have so few written so much about so little." But the fact is although the staff of the ASC is only 4 permanent full time employees, the Newsletter has always included lots of other contributors, everything from interns volunteering on special projects to scholars who want to have a new project highlighted in a non-academic way. Last year Bill wrote up a piece that included his assessment of Vikingaheimar Museum in Reykjanesbaer, after he toured it and enjoyed a reception with Jon Baldvin, Einar Benediktsson, and Gunnar Eyjolfsson. This year, Stephen Loring, who is generally in charge of soliciting outside pieces, invited me to say something about my dissertation research. This was especially welcome, since Stephen is...

Today I signed Palmer up for a week-long summer camp in Berkeley where the kids learn all about theatre and then perform on stage at the end of the week. I am really excited to have gotten Palmer in: there were only a few spots left even though the class is scheduled for late June. It is that sought-after of a program. But then Berkeley is the kind of city committed to learning, in every sense of the word, and for a lifetime. It is the kind of city that believes growth and change and experiencing new things is what makes the journey worth living. It is where the progressive movement started, but it will not be where it ends. And I am proud to be doing my part, albeit in a more traditional way, teaching a writing course to students at Cal. I am trying to teach them to be excited about learning and researching, setting them up for a lifetime of being able to tackle a subject they know very little about, and dive right into it, confident that they will be able to gather up the resources...

I have never been a great one at accumulating female friends, although I did manage to make some good ones while living in Iceland. In the U.S., it has been tougher going, averaging about 1 fun and interesting female friend every five or six years, with dry spells in between. I therefore consider myself most fortunate to have met Amanda my very first day as a graduate student at Berkeley. In a lot of ways we are a lot alike, obviously since are both interested enough in Scandinavia to be getting PhDs in the subject. We are also at the same place in the program, having started the same semester and planning on turning in our dissertations at the same time. But she is also one of the sweetest, prettiest, and kookiest grad students to have ever gone through the department, and I thank my pure timing luck that I ended up being this great woman's class mate (and yes, the feeling is mutual). We had lunch together yesterday, and well, with a good friend, you can talk about absolutely ...

I often expressed frustration, when I was in Iceland, at the lack of formality in terms of long term planning. I also expressed amazement at how often things do "rettast" (magically work out) in that fantastic little island. But no matter how many times I experienced that, it was never enough to dissuade me from preferring a well-thought out plan ratified by all involved parties. Thus it was with some dismay that in talking to my supervisors at Berkeley recently that I got a similarly "thetta rettast" kind of response. I asked my dissertation advisor and the chair of the department the same question: did they consider it important for me to file my dissertation now in May? Both of them went to great lengths to explain that there was really no need for me to do so, and that it might in fact it might be better if I waited until December to file, so whatever I wanted to do was fine. Of course academia is probably the most casual and least structured of institutions...

Today California's Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision declaring Prop. 8 unconstitutional. And the Republicans running for nomination had a show down in three states. So it was a big day in the news, all about big high stakes competitions that drag on and on. Here in my house, I am happy to report things seem to be settling in with my new cat, a boy cat named Tristan. It is always a dicey proposition, to add another cat to a household. The little girl cat I had has vacillated between hiding from him, staring at him, following him around, hissing at him, swiping at him, and rolling around the ground purring near him. I think however I might have lucked out, and I am not going to have the typical cat competition over who is the alpha cat. Instead I believe they have worked it out, that they are both the alpha cats in their own ways. Now if only gay marriage and political battles could be decided without intervention from the International Court at the Hague, ther...

The part I do not like about being a teacher is giving out assignments. I guess I am not enough of a power-tripping controller. Telling people that they have to do such and such by such and such a date has never been my style. Rather, I prefer for everyone to have a sense of working together towards a common goal. If they are adults, who have chosen to take a course, then I should not have to be forcing them to do anything. Unfortunately, at the moment I am teaching a course that is a university requirement, meaning that students are taking it because they have to. Which takes a lot of the joy out of learning, if you ask me.

I logged about roadkill in Iceland way back in 2008. Today in California, driving from Walnut Creek today, through Moraga, and then into Berkeley, I saw the following road kill: a dead skunk, a dead squirrel, a dead dear, and a dead fox. The dear has been laying dead by the side of the road for about a week, the skunk for three days, the fox for a day, and the squirrel must have died overnight since it was not there yesterday. I am tired of living a life so reliant on an automobile, I say to you truly.

The modern public education system is foundational for democracy, both in Iceland and in California. With this comes a certain hubris, that the school is rather "responsible" for a child, in a way that almost relinquishes responsibility from the parents. Of course, schools always talk about how essential parental involvement is, but it is far too easy to not get involved, and just to let the school handle whatever issues or problems come up. Plus it is difficult, as a parent, to know how to be involved without feeling like one is interfering or complaining or making the jobs of underpaid teachers and school administrators worse than it needs to be. Today though Palmer's father and I and his pediatrician all agreed that in some things, the school should not be taking the lead. Because we know Palmer far better than any teacher dealing with 20 students possibly could, or any school principal dealing with 300 students could, or any district psychologist visiting 7 campuses...

I am a Libra, and I mean really a Libra. Of the 8 planets, 7 of them were in the constellation of Libra when I was born (not just the sun, which is the main determinant of astrological sign). What this has meant for my daily life is that I have all sorts of weird OCD type things I do to try to live my life fairly. I try to not favor my right side too much, by doing things with my left hand, or putting my computer to my left, or getting out of bed on the left side, as often as possible. I try not to favor pants over skirts: I usually wear one one day and the next the other day. I have done this since I was 10 years old. Same with heals and flats. The article in Bleikt.is today made me think of this. When people talk about finding the Golden Mean, I try to figure out what in the world other way there is to do something. Because finding the balance is inborn into me; I really do not even have to think about it anymore.

So I have been given the opportunity by a company that specializes in the make-believe to do a bit of make-believing myself. If Duffensmirtz from Phineas and Ferb were a real person, and he wanted to make a runestone, what sort of runes would he use? I would not normally engage in such a futile intellectual exercise, except for the fact that I know they are actually going to make said rune-stone. There is a place picked out, a deadline to follow, and so this hypothetical is for real. Unlike many others in my life.

Sunday would have been my brother Billy's 49th birthday. My family did the best they could to find a way to think of him and about him that day, without being too terribly sad. My sister, in a weird bit of paranormal that fits better in with Iceland than the U.S., even had a mysterious message on her phone that morning about Billy, which she thought one of us had sent, but we hadn't. That was comforting, to think that he is somehow still with us, still communicating with us. In a family dynamic like ours--where we are spread out all over the place--it is not so much not seeing Billy that makes me realize he is dead. Even when he was alive, I would go months, maybe even a year or more, without seeing him. It is not hearing from him that is so hard. No emails, no text messages, no phone calls. Not hearing his voice, not reading words filled with his signature wit and intelligence, not having texts from him reminded me to do this or that, these are the things that remind me ev...

Students at Berkeley are supposed to take 12 units to be fully enrolled, and each unit is supposed to represent 5 hours of work a week. Since most classes are 4 units, the University expects the students to be taking 3 classes per semester. I am pretty sure this is what I did, although perhaps one semester took a 4th class on a pass/no pass basis. Anyhow, most of the students today take 15 units, or even 18 units, which is totally crazy. And so we, the instructors, get lectured all the time about how much of a work load our students have. Very rarely is it mentioned that this is their own choice; no one has told them they have to take such a heavy load. They sign up for the classes they want to take, and it should not be my job to assign less just because the students have figured out that they can graduate sooner if they stuff their schedules. But no matter what I assign, they always find a shortcut, utilizing what is called "minimizing effort." In other words, they are ...

Yesterday I went to a teacher training course, in other words a class for teachers to learn how to teach. One of the major differences between teachers at the primary level, and teachers at the secondary level (college and above) is that college teachers do not really know how to teach. They get teaching positions because they know a subject very well. Primary school teachers are teaching things to kids that most adults already know, so their specialized training is in how to teach something properly, given the huge range of learning styles and intellectual aptitudes one encounters amongst a random group of 7 year olds who just happen to live near one another. College teaching is totally different, in that the students of a university are generally speaking at the same intellectual level. But this does not mean their learning styles are the same, nor does it mean their maturity and motivation is the same. So there has been a trend in college level teaching to try to get professors ...

I may be spelling her name wrong, but I suppose you all know who I am talking about. She put in a guest appearance on Top Chef tonight on the Bravo channel to promote her new film, Snow White and the Huntsman. Charlize plays the wicked queen, so the aspiring chefs had to make food fit for a wicked queen. But her role tonight was that of a food critic, which she played perfectly, critiquing how well the dishes were cooked and seasoned. Although I found the premise of the show interesting, it was also sad seeing such a talented actress act so shallow. It was also sad to realize that she is now old enough to play the wicked queen, rather than Snow White.