50/50

It was hard leaving my Mission Viejo yesterday, especially since my mom's arm still was not fully recovered. There was so much she couldn't do, like even fix herself a cup of coffee, when I first got there. But the day I left she was getting back some range of motion, and well I hope she will manage without me. I had to get ready for my trip to Iceland early next week, so I could do little other than bid her farewell. I also bid farewell to my friend Christine, whom I had seen nearly everyday of my trip down there. She lives here in Northern California, only about an hour away from me, but still when she was hugging me goodbye, she said we would have to get together for my birthday, which is in October. That hardly counts as planning to see each other soon, by Icelandic standards. But she's the sort of friend I don't have trouble catching back up with, even if we go years without speaking. That is the difference between a farewell and a goodbye.

Yesterday I had a meeting with the people in charge of the Norway Pavilion at Epcot Center. I told them they ought to include Iceland in some of their historic displays, since Iceland was part of the Norwegian Kingdom for a very long time. Not surprisingly, the representative Norwegian in the group was fully in favor of expanding the definition of Norway's national boundaries to its historic maximum. Hopefully Icelanders won't mind too much.

A few days ago, the graduate advisor in my department asked me one of those big "what do you want to do with your life?" sorts of questions. Usually when people asks me this I have a vague answer, kind of an Icelandic "oh we'll see what happens". But with Professor Sandberg, I thought I ought provide a bit more thorough of an answer, since he'll be directly involved with whether or not I have a position at Berkeley in the future. He also asked it in the right way I guess, because he said "Are you still planning on going into the museum field?" Somewhat to my surprise, I had a very cogent nd complete answer to this question. For a bit of background, he had written a book on museums, and his interest in museums was one of the reasons I had joined the department at Cal. So normally I have played up my interest in museums to him. But not this time. Instead I found myself saying that actually, my negative experience with museums recently, and my p...

I spent this morning with my friend Christine, whose mother passed away last month. Christine is an only child, so she has inhereted her mother's house, and has decided to sell it. So she's currently going through the house, trying to "stage it" before putting it on the market. Her mother lived I that house for 40 years, so there is a lot of stuff. It doesn't help that Chrisrine was a big fan of collectibles, and had given her mother lots of them. I think "collectibles" may be a particularly American phenomena, at least in terms of the plastic molded figurines in the shape of cats, angels, old fashioned houses, ferries, birds, children, etc. I have never encontered any of these in an Icelandic home. Or a maybe I just don't know enough 60 year old widows in Iceland.

I decided that it was better to let my son play video games rather than watch youtube postings of other people playing video games. So I bought him a Nintendo Wii game system for his birthday, which is today. It came with Super Mario Brothers, and I also bought him Kirby's Epic Yarn. My little male cousins in Iceland were not as interested in video games as kids here in the U.S. seem to be, I guess because they can just get sent outside for hours on end without supervision. We get arrested if we do that here. Anyhow, I am happy with my purchase. He is having a good time, especially with Kirby's Epic Yarn, where it is a lot harder to get killed than in Super Mario Brothers. I did something wrong in the setup, so there is no audio, but Palmer was so excited to play that he doesn't mind. I guess I will try to fix it later.

Yesterday, I was picking up a futon from a graduate student who is moving from Berkeley to New Jersey. Her name is Jessica, and although she has been working on the same floor as I have in Dwinelle Hall for the last year and half, we had never actually met before. So after I'd bought the futon from her, we got chit-chatting about the configuration of the academic departments, and how our floor, which consists of the faculty of the Scandinavian, Italian, and Slavic departments, does not integrate quite as well as one would hope. I was telling her that I frequently have conversations with another graduate student whose name I do not even know. In hopes that Jessica knew her name, I described the woman in question as having long blond curly hair and not too tall. Jessica looked at me blankly for a minute, told me the name of another student who has dark long curly hair, and I was like no, blond. So then she said, "Oh, do you mean the one who always wears make-up and whose clothes...

It sounds like Iceland is not going to be marking the transition to a new president anytime soon, even though today was an election day there. That is too bad, because transitions are a good thing. Yesterday afternoon, several of us from my department went out for beers to celebrate our own little transitional moment. The occasion was both the end of the first summer teaching session and to celebrate the fact the my classmate, Carl, accepted a teaching position at Gustavus Adolfus college in Minnesota. It seemed like a good moment then to mark the transition from the old departmental make-up, which has included Carl teaching for the last six or seven years straight, into the next phase. Another classmate of mine, Molly, started talking about other types of transitions we go through as graduate students in the Scandinavian Department at Berkeley. She recently finished her PhD qualifying exams, a process I went through in 2007. That is a grueling process of being locked in a room by ...

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the U.S. made a ruling on what had been called the most monumental case in U.S. history, though surely that was a slight exaggeration. It was anyhow on all the news outlets constantly for the last several weeks, and  when the actual case was being heard back in the spring, it was covered like the O.J. Simpson trial. So the entire U.S. has been focused on this court case for the better part of six months, no joke. For Icelanders, it might be hard to imagine just how important this court case was for Americans. On the legal side, it was ruling on a small technicality of the law that, if overturned, would have put in jeopardy a whole slue of Federal government policies. The reason for this is that to overturn this law, the court would have had to rule that the Federal government was not allow to impose taxes for anything that was not strictly financial (commerce) in nature. This would have put all sorts of government incentives--everything from environ...

Included in the package of Icelandic hotdogs I was sent were two bags of Icelandic candy called kúlu-súkk. This is a very clever name for a very yummy candy. A kúla being something small and round, and súkk being an English borrowing for the verb suck, which works well for chocolate-covered balls of soft licorice that melt in your mouth with just the barest salty aftertaste. It is also a clever name because it is very similar to the name of a town on the east coast of Greenland, Kulusuk, where flights departing Iceland for Greenland often land. So it is a bit exotic and unknown, reachable and yet removed. I have never been to Kulusuk, but now I kind of want to.

American academic essay writing is different than Icelandic in a lot of little ways. I notice this often, since I teach the American style but read a lot of Icelandic essays. Basically this means I am mentally editing all the Icelandic essays I read to conform more to the American system. Right now I am trying to teach my students, most of whom are Asian, the American essay writing style. One of the biggest challenges with the American essay is coming up with a good beginning. One that isn't too dramatic or over stated (ie: since the beginning of time man has sought the truth of the universe) because that is just forced and inauthentic and too much pressure for one little college essay.

In order to get hotdogs from Iceland for the 17th of June Icelandic Independence Day Celebration, a fairly complex network of people became involved. And it reminded me of just how much more interconnected Icelanders are with one another, than Americans. Here, if you want to get something done, you have to do it according to specified channels. There isn't a network of subtle relationships interconnecting all Americans. There are family, friends, and business relations, but not 50 people who fulfill all of those roles at once floating around. So in a way, even though there are less Icelanders, each one is capable of getting more done. Like getting hotdogs halfway around the world for no cost on five days notice.

This weekend, the Icelandic American Association of Northern California is going to be celebrating 17 júni at a park north of San Francisco. Somewhat ironically, it is going to be held at the Sons of Norway lodge, but once you get over on this side of the ocean differences between the Nordic countries get a little fuzzy. But I have insisted on one little bit of purity. If I am going to eat a hotdog at a 17 júni barbeque, it has to be an Icelandic hotdog. No approximation of it, nothing similar, no high-grade American dog, nothing but a real íslensk pylsur will do. So far there are still some details of this plan up in the air, but I shall keep you updated.

Today is Palmers last day of first grade, and I am going to be volunteering in his classroom. Poor kid has been a bit anxious about the end if the school year, and hasn't slept well all week. I hope my presence in the classroom will help calm him down, so he can have at least a better day.

Last week I taught the Vinland sagas to my summer session students, and just finished grading their essays about them this morning. Almost everyone focused on the character of Freydis, with several of the students making broad generalizations about "women in the sagas" based on her character. So although the course is a literature survey, and not a course on the Vikings, I felt compelled to at least give a few comments on women in the Viking and early medieval period. The students had somehow gotten the impression (probably from The Saga of the Faeroe Islanders, which we also read) that women in the Viking Age were really degraded (I guess I did not emphasize enough that its misogynistic attitude probably reflected the view of its medieval redactor). So today I launched into a mini discussion of the non-saga evidence we have about the role of women, and ended up talking a lot about Eddic poetry, especially the heroic poems that comprise the latter half of the Poetic Edda. O...

In the United States, where the President wields a great deal of power, presidential debates are extremely important events, carefully planned out well in advance. All candidates who are participating are sent details about the program and all the rules in advance, and have a chance to comment and critique the format formally in writing ahead of time.  So I am trying not to have too American of a response to the idea that this evening's presidential debate in Iceland was so adhoc and unplanned that the respondents did not even know the simplest things about the format of the debate before the television program began.  Spaugstofan indeed. 

I made a quick trip down to Southern California Friday and Saturday, and although I had seen my mom, my dad, and my brother just a few weeks ago for my graduation ceremony, apparently in the interim I have gained a significant amount of weight. Of course I knew I was trending in that direction, but it wasn't until this weekend, when my mom and dad and brother all separately, and without malice, made the straight forward comment that I have put on some weight that I realized it has now gotten to the point where not only do I notice it, so do others. It was perhaps especially noticeable because my brother has, in contrast, lost at least 10 pounds since I last saw him 2 weeks ago. So this led to the typical conversation about why I am gaining weight. The explanations bandied about included: 1) I am sitting at my desk too much, writing my dissertation, and snacking; 2) I am not getting enough exercise; 3) I am not terribly happy these days and I always gain weight when I am unhappy; ...

I was hoping to write a nice long blog about the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge festival, which Palmer and I went to yesterday. But we got a late start, and Palmer was very tired, so we didn't stay long, and I ended up not taking a single picture. But I did want to say that the setting of the festival, on a grassy field right beside the bay, reminded me a lot of the setting of Ljósanótt in Reykjanesbær. And then there was a stage where local bands were playing, just like at Ljósanótt. And just like at Ljósanótt, the bands were complaining about it being too windy. There was also a parade of old cars at the festival for the Golden Gate Bridge, which reminded me of the parade of cars at Ljósanótt. But I must say, I had more fun at Ljósanótt.

Last night I bought tickets for Palmer and I to spend the 4th of July in Washington D.C. That is always a great time to be in "our nation's capital" and I think Palmer will get a kick out of the firework displays and the folklife festival. My former boss at the Smithsonian will be in Mongolia in June and early July, so he said we could stay at his house, which is right on Capital Hill, just two blocks away from the Supreme Court Building. So Palmer and I will be able to walk all around the Mall, see the monuments and the museums. It should be fun. This has got me thinking a little bit about when I used to work at the Smithsonian. I was hired on with special funds from the Nordic Council of Ministers, for the express purpose of working on the Viking exhibition, and started working there in 1997, just as they were beginning to plan the Viking exhibition. That exhibition opened in 2000, and toured around the U.S. and Canada until 2003. So when 2003 rolled around, the mone...

Today my son's father and I met with his teacher, the school principal, the school district psychologist, an administrative person, and a woman named Mrs. Hubert. Mrs. Hubert is paid by the school to run a program called "Kid's Connection," which has a curriculum she seems to have invented herself. I wish I had asked more questions about her, and about the program, before signing Palmer up for it. But when the school contacted us, and told us that Palmer was having trouble socializing with the other kids, it seemed like a good idea to try this program, which pairs up Palmer with one other kid, and then Mrs. Hubert teaches them to play nice together. I have now become a bit embittered by this whole thing, so I don't think I can write about it without it sounding a little sarcastic. From the bits of conversation with her today, I just got more and more of a bad taste in my mouth. Which is of course a very strange reaction, to this incredibly nice, matronly woman who...

On Sunday, my family members are driving to see me, from many many miles away, so that they can be with me on Tuesday. That is the day of my graduation ceremony. I will be getting hooded as a Doctor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature. I have all the required medieval looking hat and robe and hood, in the official school colors. I may however skip the robe, and just wear the hat (called a "tam" because it is made of velvet and octagonal) and hood with a knitted Icelandic dress that my friend Koleen gave me when I lived in Iceland. She had found it at Goða Hirðinn. I'll post pictures here of the event. But today I am not in a very celebratory mood, because I received some rather sad news. In addition to my family, I had also invited a few of my dearest girlfriends to come to the event, but first one was disinvited after she broke up with my brother, then another was unable to come because she was called to a job interview in the midwest. But my friend Christine was ...