A little milestone

Today is the day that my blog reached a little milestone--15,000 page views! Thank you to all of you who read the blog, to those who comment, to those who have written to me personally--I appreciate each and every one of you, your interest and your input. As long as there are topics to write about, I will continue to blog, because I really enjoy writing A New Yorker in Oslo.

Sing-along

I attended a very enjoyable dinner party yesterday evening; a friend invited about fifteen of her good friends to share her birthday celebration with her. Get a group of women together, and you know the evening won’t lack for enthusiastic and interesting conversation, and it didn’t. But this evening ended up being a heck of a lot of fun in a whole new way. The hostess sings in a choir, as do a number of her friends. In other words, she loves to sing. So she invited us to a sing-along, in this instance, to the film The Sound of Music. In between eating dinner and dessert, we watched the film from start to finish and sang the different songs as they showed up in the film. We had been dealt out our respective roles, many of which overlapped with others at the party. For example, I was dealt out the singing role for Rolf, the nun, and Gretl, along with two other women at the party. I had never done this before, so naturally I was a bit skeptical (as I always am) to anything that might place me at the center of any unwanted attention. I also love to sing, but reserve it mostly for when I am puttering around at home alone or in the shower or in the typical places one might sing—mostly alone when no one is listening. I have been told that I have a good singing voice, but I don’t sing in a choir and am unlikely to do so at this point in my life. But I have to say that this sing-along experience was an incredibly uplifting and fun group activity, with no particular focus on any one person, and that made it all the more enjoyable. At different points, I found myself listening to us as we hit the high notes, and how our voices all soared in unison, and it was a rush. I sometimes get that feeling when I am in church and the entire congregation sings and the united voices lift you to a whole new place. It’s a wonderful experience and one that will move you out of yourself if you let it.

I was very young when I first saw The Sound of Music; seeing it again was a moving experience, because Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and the children were wonderful to watch. All of us watching the film shared our memories of the time in our lives when we had first seen the film. Some of the women had been taken to the theater by their parents, some by their schools—but all of us had been touched by our original experience of the film. And I have to say that it was like being at a teenage slumber party again listening and watching grown women hoot, holler and comment when Maria and Georg kissed for the first time, or when the Baroness tried her best to keep Georg and Maria from being together. It made me realize that there is a common bond among women that transcends cultures, if allowed to surface, which is what this film was able to accomplish for us last night. There was a lot of laughing as well as singing, and it was all a great deal of fun. I’d love to do it again. 

Creatures of the night

Up late the other night—of course I regretted it the following day, but the reason I stayed up late was to watch the vampire film The Hunger from 1983 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085701/) on TCM. I can never really pass up an opportunity to watch yet another stylishly-made horror film, and TCM is a great channel to find all those kinds of classic films, horror or otherwise. I won’t say I was enthralled by the film, but it didn’t disappoint either—it had its moments. It is definitely a film from the 1980s—I read somewhere that a critic had said it was like watching a long MTV video—chic and stylish with cool music, but without much substance—that was the gist of it. The Madonna song Vogue came to mind when I was watching it. The actors and actresses (David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon) did a lot of posing for the camera, but that was the way things were done then. The film was about modern-day vampires in an urban setting, who frequented New York City nightclubs looking for potential victims. These vampires were unlike most of the vampires we’ve come to know about--they could tolerate the light of day, they murdered their victims with small knives shaped like Egyptian ankhs, and they could see their reflections in mirrors. The story had to do with David Bowie’s vampire John trying to find a cure for his rapid aging that had suddenly set in and that would doom him to eternal life without his vampire lover Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) who had made him a vampire in the first place. The film was probably controversial when it came out due to some graphic scenes of violence and sexual (lesbian) activity. I don’t recall much talk about this film from that time, nor do I remember that it opened in many theaters (according to IMDB it opened in 775 theaters nationwide in the USA, approximately 15 per state if it opened in all of them—that’s not many). Perhaps it was considered an ‘art film’, in which case it would have opened at one or two theaters in Westchester County where I grew up.   

I’ve seen many vampire films in my lifetime—starting with the House of Dark Shadows from 1970 directed by Dan Curtis, with Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas Collins (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065856/), followed by Scars of Dracula and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (among several others) from 1970 and 1973 respectively (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067713/; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070634/) with Christopher Lee as the vampire (he made many Dracula films). These were followed by the original Nosferatu film from 1922 directed by FW Murnau with Max Schreck as a very scary Nosferatu (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013442/), as well as Nosferatu the Vampyre from 1979 directed by Werner Herzog, with Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079641/). I remember the New York Times review of the latter film talking about the furor in the Netherlands (where the film was partially shot) over Herzog’s wanting to release tens of thousands of rats for one of the scenes in the film.  Talk about the quest for realism on the part of a director.  

The classic Dracula from 1931, directed by Tod Browning, with Bela Lugosi (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021814/), and Dracula from 1979, directed by John Badham, with Frank Langella http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079073/, are very good films, as is Interview with the Vampire from 1994, directed by Neil Jordan, with Tom Cruise as Lestat (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110148/). But in my opinion, the best vampire film I’ve ever seen is the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula directed by Francis Ford Coppola (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874/). I remember watching it for the first time when it came out and being totally drawn in by its mastery and haunting atmosphere. I’ve since seen it several more times, and each time I watch it I admire it more and more as a nearly-perfect Dracula film. Gary Oldman as Dracula was brilliant casting—he did an incredible job, as did Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins and all the others. It is the specific scenes in Coppola’s film that are unforgettable and haunting and that make it my favorite vampire movie—when Jonathan Harker (played by Keanu Reeves) arrives at Dracula’s castle and the shadow of the vampire precedes his entrance, Dracula crawling down the walls of the castle on one of his nightly outings, the appearance of the female vampires in the castle and their seduction of Jonathan, Dracula’s meeting with Mina, and so many more.

Besides Gary Oldman’s Dracula, I have to say that Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas Collins is my vampire of choice. I’m not a fan of the Twilight vampire movies; I saw the first film after reading the book and it was not for me, but I understand that many people do like it. I might have liked the series as a pre-teenager, but somehow I have the feeling that my entrance into the world of vampires was forever shaped by Dark Shadows. However campy the series might have been at times, it took itself seriously and has amassed a large number of fans through the years. I’m looking forward to Tim Burton’s version of Dark Shadows and Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Barnabas, but I doubt that anyone could ever surpass Jonathan Frid’s portrayal of Barnabas Collins.

Some people have all the luck!

Some lucky people in Norway got to see spectacular light shows last night–the Northern Lights made their appearance as a result of a lot of solar storm activity lately. We were told by the media that the Lights would be visible all over the country (true for the rest of the Northern hemisphere as well according to the media), so I was awake and ready with my camera, but Oslo had cloudy skies and little visibility–thus no Lights. So I have to be satisfied with looking at these gorgeous photos!! Time to plan a trip north to see the Lights! I want to experience them in person. I've realized lately that my particular interest as a photographer is the fascination with anything that has to do with light--the way it plays on water, in the sky, or the way it produces colors and contrasts, rainbows after a storm--all those things. 

http://nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/nordland/1.7967958


And here is another link, this time to a video of the Northern Lights, filmed by Alister Chapman on the evening of January 24th in Tromsø, Norway. It's called Dance of the Spirits, and it's a very apt name--beautiful.


http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/solar-storms-spawn-hyperactive-aurora-boreali/?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto

The beauty of the Akerselva river in winter

Two short videos taken on Sunday January 22nd 2012 when I was out early in the morning walking along the Akerselva river. The first one shows the mallard ducks swimming in the icy river--you've got to love these birds. I love watching them. As I often say, birds rule. The second video shows the waterfall near Hønsa Lovisas house and the ice buildup and formations at the base of the falls. Pretty cool looking. I have always been fascinated by rivers in winter--especially when they freeze, either fully or partially. I remember back to my teenage days when I took pictures of the Hudson River (in Tarrytown, New York) that had almost frozen over. It was like watching a land of ice come to life. Very solitary, very beautiful.

Lean Mean Fighting Machine

Christine Koht, a Norwegian media personality and program leader, is also a columnist for A-magazine, Aftenposten’s weekend magazine. Her column this past Friday was about the Lean management philosophy, how it has invaded Norwegian workplaces, and the effect it has had on many employees, whom as she described, are just so tired of being told how to be better. She lectures and entertains at many different workplaces around the country, and described how many of the employees she meets in her travels are feeling these days about their workplaces (translated from Norwegian):

‘I travel quite a lot around this country, entertaining at different workplaces, and everywhere I go I encounter the same ideal—continuous improvement. Counting and measurements and endless documenting are presumably what it takes to find out how everything can always be better. But everyone is so tired of it. Doctors and plumbers, engineers and teachers--all of them are finding that their workdays and their job enthusiasm are being drained dry by the perpetual need to document everything they do’.  

I have to admit that this was the first time I had ever heard about this management philosophy. First it was New Public Management (NPM), now it's Lean. So I decided that it’s time to read up on these business philosophies that have taken over the workplace. I’ve already written a post on New Public Management. Actually, we're knee-deep in NPM in the public sector and rather stuck there, so how did Lean get a foothold? I am interested in these philosophies because I see what they are doing to workplaces. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the word Lean was the old expression ‘lean mean fighting machine’. And it seems that this management philosophy is all about reducing waste and continuous improvement, so that your company ends up ‘fit for fight’—a lean mean fighting machine in a competitive global economy. It seems to have started as a management philosophy for manufacturing—how to improve efficiency of production by focusing on waste reduction. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how this philosophy can be applied to public sector organizations. For one thing, it is the exact opposite of NPM as far as I can see. Correct me if I’m wrong, but NPM has only led to massive increases in layers of administration and administrative positions—too many chiefs and not enough Indians, in other words. So if Lean is now the management philosophy of choice—what possibilities exist to eliminate waste? Should the Lean business consultants, strategists and gurus start by ‘removing’ the very layers of administration that NPM set in place? Because anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that it is the exponential growth of administration that is clogging the system, reducing efficiency and causing waste. The administrators need to administrate and to control the employees who are doing the actual work. The numbers of actual workers are decreasing relative to the number of administrators set in place to administrate them.

I also see what these different trends in management philosophies have done to workplace leaders, how desperate some of them are to effect change, any change, in a panicked attempt to leave a legacy behind them when they go. They also have to be able to say to a new employer—‘I managed to implement this or that change in my former workplace, and it’s working very well. I can do miracles with your workplace if you only give me a chance’. Or I can at least imagine that this is what they are desperate to achieve, otherwise why do so many of them—men and women alike--look so harried and haggard? When you meet with them, they come up with yet another idea for how you can be better, how you can improve your workday, how you can best serve your workplace and those ideas are completely different than the ones they were so adamant about your accepting just a year ago. And when you remind them of what they insisted upon a year ago, they get irritated and don’t want to hear about the past. The past for them is the past—gone, non-existent (as though it never existed), passé, and a taboo topic of conversation. It’s all about relativeness (changing with circumstances) these days. When you remind them that you personally might want to learn from past mistakes, they don’t want to hear that either. They also don’t want to hear that you want to take your time now in making a decision that will affect how you perform your work duties for the next few years. They just want you to accept what they want you to accept—NOW. It doesn’t matter if they change their minds again in six months. 

When will workplace leaders realize that efficiency is the last thing that results from incessant poking and prodding and change? Employees work best and most efficiently in an environment that lets them do the job they are paid to do, in other words, in a stable and supportive environment. They work best in an environment where the infrastructure in place supports them in their quest to do a good job, rather than hindering them, as is often the case in overly-bureaucratic and overly-administrated environments. There is no stability in an atmosphere of constant change, in an environment that incessantly pokes and prods its employees at every turn in an effort to get them to produce more and to be more efficient. There are many employees who have done a terrific job, who have produced for their companies, and who are tired. Just plain tired—of being told they haven’t done enough, that they aren’t good enough, that they need to change, that they are resistant to change, that they are too set in their ways, or that they need to just ‘adapt’ to yet another way of looking at their job. What if the new management philosophy could be one with a laissez-faire focus, one that led to appreciation of employees and to company management which understood that employee competence and expertise are the reasons that employees were hired in the first place, which understood that ‘more and better’ all the time doesn’t lead to efficiency and that if employees are appreciated that they will produce in ways that a company could only dream of? What if companies understood that enough is enough and that better is often the enemy of good, and that more means never enough? Management should back off and let employees be. But that would mean treating employees like adults and not children. Are company managements up to that? Only time will tell.

I’m not arguing against all forms of self-improvement; I’m actually a proponent of self-improvement in the personal arena. By that I mean—striving to be the best person you can be in the situations in which you find yourself. We can always learn new ways of looking at things, always have new and different responses if we’ve learned from our mistakes. My problem is when self-improvement/job improvement is forced upon you by people who have little to no idea of what they’re doing and who have no idea of who you really are or of what you need in a workplace setting. So let’s see if I can get this right. If I need advice on how to be a better scientist, I will consult a highly-successful scientist, not an administrator. Likewise, if I need advice on how to be a better friend or spouse, I’ll consult people who have good track records in both departments or who work in the psychology and social work fields, but not an administrator. By documenting all that we do, administrators conclude that they know us and that they are competent enough to tell us how to do the jobs we were hired to do. But they are not. However, if I need help with balancing a budget sheet or with filling out a complicated form, I’ll consult an administrator. But that is very seldom. So perhaps these management philosophies are more about finding valid work for the administrators to do. The employees they are administrating know for the most part what they are doing and why, and how to reach their professional goals without administrative interference. The more time we spend on administrative tasks, the less time we have to work at our real jobs, and then productivity and efficiency fly out the window. 

A day in the life of a scientist

Dead tired this morning, but made it to work by the usual time. Started the day by walking to the main cafeteria to buy a cup of (regular) coffee. Can’t live without my coffee. Already had my espresso at home before we left for work. Latest research shows—coffee is good for you—three or four cups a day—perfect. Opened Outlook—checked my emails. One of them was a thank-you email from a granting agency in Singapore thanking me for reviewing two of their grant applications. I do that now—I get paid for it. Got started on answering my emails early, and got them out of the way. Trying to figure out the best way to formulate emails these days can take several hours for just a couple of them. Made a few phone calls. Arranged an examiner for my Master’s student who will have her exam in June—took all of about half an hour. Ecstatic! Wasn’t as easy three years ago when I had to find opponents for my PhD student. Frustrating then. Went and talked to one of the women in the pathology department who is the administrative leader for the technicians there. Talked about the logistics of a project that needs technical help from the department. One of my jobs now—to coordinate external and internal research projects that require routine technical help. Went online to get price information for two items that needed to be ordered. Went to the secretary who enters the orders into the computer. Chatted for a while. Have decided that nice is the way to be; everything goes more smoothly when you treat others well. Don’t care if the rest of the world thinks it’s not efficient. Can honestly say that I've been nice to others most of the time. Worked through lunch doing my consulting job. On Twitter checking out all the updates. What would I do without it? Better than Facebook in so many ways. So much info on social media, so little time. 

Started working after lunch on analyzing some statistical data for my student’s project—realized I had made so many mistakes the first time I filled in the data tables. Why? I was dead tired and when you are dead tired you shouldn’t be working at the computer filling in data tables. Couldn’t understand why the graphs looked so odd afterwards—huge standard errors. Now I know. Solved that problem. Moving right along. Did a literature search on microRNAs—they’re what’s hot now besides stem cells. Feeling the pressure to conform again. Maybe I’ll get more grant support that way. Can I do like the others? We’ll see at grant time in May when I start writing them. Printed out four review articles on microRNAs. Went back to working on the statistical data. Playing around with grouping the data in different ways to produce different plots. Saw some interesting differences between untreated and treated samples—there might be a story after all. Ecstatic again! It’s not often that happens. Most of the time—balloons get punctured. Started dreaming about the experiments I want to do. Usually do this whenever lab work goes well. When it goes badly, I want to go home, crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. Saved the statistical tables in one file, emailed a copy of it to my home email, and decided that for once I will look at it during the weekend. But right now, glad it’s Friday. Monday it starts all over again……..

The desire to write

The desire to write grows with writing.

— Desiderius Erasmus

There was a time in my life, a long time ago when I was in grammar school, when the mere mention of writing an essay for a class exam would strike terror in my mind and heart. The teacher would hand out those little blank blue essay books, reserved for the privilege of exam time when we would have to write out the longer answers to exam questions, or write the dreaded essay. All I remember is that my brain went blank; I froze and could not for the life of me come up with one essay idea to write about that I thought was even remotely creative. I could not write on cue, with someone standing over me or in front of the room, telling me ‘time’s up’ after one hour. Even the memory of it today makes me flinch. I remember struggling to find an idea, any idea, and wasting precious time trying to find the perfect idea. By the time I came up with an idea worthy (in my mind) of writing about, I had to rush through to get it finished on time. I am surprised that I ever did as well as I did; looking back, I’m guessing that my teachers knew that I tried hard, and that since I was good in all my other subjects, they cut me some slack.

I was no good then (or now) at performing on cue, in the same way that I am no good at coming up with snappy retorts or good arguments on cue, unless I know the person I am bantering back and forth with/discussing with and unless we have a certain level of understanding with each other. It wasn’t until I started high school that I got interested in writing for the fun of it, and that started in an English class taught by an excellent teacher, who remains a friend to this day. He loved literature and books, and it shone through. He loved teaching and he loved to tell us about what he read, or he read it to us—poetry, snippets of a short story, a newspaper article. It didn’t matter. If he was jazzed about something, he shared it with us. That’s a good teacher. He encouraged us to write, and it didn’t matter what we wrote—poetry, prose, essays, plays—all of it mattered to him. Because if we wrote, he was happy. When I re-read most of my early poetry, I cringe. But some of those early poems were good. That taught me an important lesson—the 99:1 lesson. For every 100 things you attempt creatively, 99 will not pass muster and 1 will be good to excellent. So I am happy if one of 100 poems I’ve written is good. But that shouldn’t discourage us, because that’s how the creative life is. Heck, that’s how life is in general. It’s the same way in research science, perhaps even more so. You can perform many experiments to test out many ideas, but perhaps only one or two will be worth following up and writing about. Science, like writing, requires patience and perseverance. It’s not about quitting at the first sign of trouble. It’s about not getting bowled over by the endless rejections. It’s about having a good cry when your work gets rejected or your experiments fail for the umpteenth time and then getting back up on the horse. Lately, the scientific horse has less appeal to me than the creative writing horse. But that’s just where I am these days, and it will have to do.

The early lessons in grammar and high school shaped me. I persevered in my overall studies, and ended up in science. But I continued to write, all the way through college and graduate school, my first job (that had a lot of dead time in the lab; I wrote poems on scraps of paper), all the way up to the present time. I wrote poetry—tons of it. I wrote short stories. I started several novels. I tried to publish a book of my poetry; it was rejected by a major publishing house in New York, but they actually did read the poems and picked out the ones they liked and told me why. That helped me. I didn’t get back a crass review like we risk and often get each time we send a research article to a scientific journal for review by our ‘peers’. It’s hard to hear for the umpteenth time that ‘your article is unfortunately too descriptive and would have been better if you had done the same experiments in five additional cell lines’. Your heart sinks when you read these words, because just doing the experiments you did in two or three cell lines might have taken two years. So how many years can you spend on one piece of work, making it better, making it perfect? When there is no such thing as perfection, when we know that we cannot achieve perfection on this earth? We have to draw a line somewhere, have to know where to stop. As one teacher said to me very early on ‘better is the enemy of good’. What we do can always be better. A better perspective may appear years on down the road. But we can’t go back and change what we did even when we know that the new perspective might be more correct, more fitting, or more relevant. Done is done, published is published.

The desire to write does grow with writing. It also grows with feedback. Every time someone comments on something I write—whether or not they agree with what I wrote—if they tell me it was well-written, I want to continue writing. The feeling of having touched people, having reached them, having stimulated new thoughts or feelings—that is a large part of what makes me want to continue writing. But mostly, the desire to write is innate—it’s always been there and always will be there. It just had to be set free, and it took one excellent teacher to do that for me. I can read a book or a magazine or watch a movie now, and ideas flood my brain. I start thinking—I can write about this or that. I just need to remember the idea. That is a fear—not remembering the idea or ideas, not remembering a scenario or a formulation. You need to strike while the iron is hot. Ideas fade from memory. It pays to write them down somewhere; so that your memory gets jogged the next time you read what you wrote. But just like we will never write the perfect novel or essay, we will never have a perfect thought or a perfect retrieval system for thoughts. That is another lesson about being human—we must take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, in the moment that they present themselves. If there truly is a collective unconscious and I believe there is, the pool of wisdom, mythology, thoughts and ideas that abide there will perhaps make the rounds another time and filter into our brains again. But that could take years, if it happens at all. In the meantime, it’s best to jot ideas down, and then to get started writing about them. It leads to somewhere good.

Be careful what you wish for

Whenever I look at the statistics for the blog posts I’ve written, I find that posts about modern workplaces are among the most popular. I guess this shouldn’t surprise me, because we spend a good portion of our lives in our workplaces, so it’s not strange that we want to both understand and feel a part of them. I’ve spoken to many different people lately, both here in Norway and in the USA, and the thoughts, complaints, and experiences they share mirror my own. There have been huge changes in our workplaces just during the past ten years. It seems to me as though they have happened gradually, but the overall effect has been jarring. And if I am honest, I know that with each change that occurs in my own workplace, I am pushed out of my comfort zone yet again. The time allotted for engaging in and experiencing a new comfort zone gets shorter and shorter. The idea I suppose is that we’re not supposed to ‘get comfortable’—the new way of thinking is that it’s bad for productivity and efficiency. Modern workplaces are about change—change at any cost, change for change’s sake, change for the sake of modernization, change to meet the needs of the future, change to improve the quality of workplace life for employees, change to deal with an aging employee population—there may be many reasons for change. After having been pushed and prodded for the past several years, I am finally awake to what is going on around me, and I find that I am beginning to get some kind of overview, a bird’s eye view as it were, on the whole thing. But I am a long way from understanding it.

What I can surmise from all the changes is that many of them are about control—controlling huge organizations, be they universities, hospitals, corporations—it doesn’t matter. The growth of administration to effect this control has led to micromanagement and dissection of all that we took for granted before, all that functioned without us really knowing how or why. And since it functioned, we really didn’t have to know how or why it did. We trusted that this or that particular system (ordering, accounting, invoicing, archiving) was run by people who knew what they were doing, just as we knew what we were doing in our own spheres. It was fine to ‘take each other for granted’, respect each other’s differences, and go on about our daily work lives. Since the ultra-business people with their new management trends have taken over, we are forced to acknowledge their presence, forced to interact with them on a daily basis. They want us to know they are there—not that they are there to serve us; rather that we are there to serve them. They want to be acknowledged for all they do and they want us to know that they are in charge. So now we know. Now we know the answer to the old joke—how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb? How many people does it take to order a computer, or three items needed for work, or to create an invoice, or to create and fill out a work order so that eventual work can be planned? An easy answer is now six or more people, if you’re lucky. Administration grows exponentially. I’m guessing that the jobs of the future are in business administration. Young people should take notice.

Many of the changes are also about creating a lack of accountability. What do I mean by this? You can no longer relate personally to one individual who might be able to help you. The impersonal shield as I call it goes up the minute you ask to speak to one person who might know the answer to your question. You must rather deal with six or more people whose names you will never remember. And that’s the point. Or if you get an email from one of the six, it is with a cc: to the other five, so that you will never know with certainty that the person who wrote to you is the person you should deal with in the future. In this way, no one person is accountable; no one person can be blamed if a problem should arise. But this also means that no one person can receive the honor for a job well-done. They must all share it communally, like it and keep quiet if they don’t.

This lack of accountability is also part of what I call the dilution effect. Call it spreading out the blame, the praise, the responsibility, the actual job tasks—whatever may be involved. No one person can be responsible for one specific job anymore—that would be tantamount to giving full control to one individual, and that cannot be tolerated in modern workplaces, because that would give one person autonomy and a sense of well-being. So the job is diluted out, which leads to a thinning-out of its effectiveness, much like what happens if you dilute the concentration of a medicine that might help you—if it’s too dilute, it loses its effectiveness. I don’t blame the people who sit in these positions—they are told what to do by their superiors. But it’s a sorry state of affairs we’ve reached when high levels of competence and expertise are no longer encouraged. What’s rather encouraged is team-playing , sharing the expertise and diluting out one’s competence and accepting that it should be this way. What happens to a company or to a society when competence is diluted out in this way? Can we trust that teams of people with limited information about their individual jobs can fly, drive or manage the planes, trains, or companies of the future, respectively? Personally, I want to fly in a plane that I know is in the hands of fully-competent individuals, so that if something happened to two of the three pilots, the remaining one would be fully-competent to tackle the situation alone. Ditto for a train. Ditto for a company.  

What is our role in creating the current situation? I wonder. The old adage ‘be careful what you wish for, you might get it’ comes to mind. Have we wished for some of this? I think the answer is yes. I think unwittingly, every time we said that we wished there was a more defined system for this or that, every time we worshipped on the altars of productivity and efficiency, every time we wanted to give up some autonomy because it was too tiring to think or do for ourselves---we were wishing for someone to come along and take control for us. Call it a collective wishing. We may have bought into the business philosophies that talked about how much more effective everything would be after a huge merger. We wished for that effectiveness. It seemed like a real solution, even when we were already productive—we wanted more. But nothing that gets to be the size of a bloated whale or a huge lumbering dinosaur can be effective. Bigger is not always better. Is it always wanting more, better, bigger that will destroy us? Or turn us into bloated whales and lumbering dinosaurs? We are not meeting the needs of the future in this format, that’s for sure. 

Workplace haikus

Yet another change

Be still my tired heart and brain

Smile grin and bear it.

Old adage says keep

Friends close enemies closer

Good advice for now.

Another meeting

Lots of chiefs few indians

Too many leaders.

Thinking back to when

Free speech and thought were valued

Not controlled by prigs.

Administrators

Abound about me rabbits

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copyright 2012 Paula M. De Angelis

To forgive and move on

The Norwegian writer Niels Fredrik Dahl wrote an interesting article for this past Friday’s A-magazine (the weekend magazine for the newspaper Aftenposten) about the daughter of Anna Wahlgren, ‘a Swedish author, lecturer, child rearing expert and mother of nine’ as it says on her Facebook page. The daughter—Felicia Feldt—is angry at her mother and has published a new book that deals with her growing up years and how much she hates her mother. According to Feldt, her mother did not practice what she preached to the outside world—she partied hard, drank a lot, and was abusive to her nine children, among a number of other unpleasant behaviors. Her book has attracted a lot of attention; Anna Wahlgren apparently has no desire to comment on her daughter’s allegations.

Dahl writes, and I quote (translated from Norwegian)—‘We live with a mentality and in a time when reconciliation cannot happen fast enough. Anything else than mild, manageable grief and the desire to forgive is seen as a backward detour, an inadequacy. You are not allowed to be angry, to think about revenge, or to scream’. He ends his article by asking ‘What if you are Felicia Feldt?’

Indeed. What if you are? What if you are someone who is angry and bitter, who hates the person who mistreated you? What if you cannot forgive immediately? What right does society have to judge you? What if you bottle your anger on a daily basis because you know that society does not tolerate it or your grief? I think Dahl brings up some really interesting points. I am not sure if he is just referring to Scandinavian society when he says that we live in a time when reconciliation cannot happen fast enough or that intense grief or anger or the lack of a desire to forgive are seen as personal weaknesses. I applaud his bringing this topic up. It is about time that someone did. The past ten or so years in Norwegian society have convinced me that he is right. We are encouraged to forgive (no matter what), to communicate, to dialog, to negotiate, to not be judgmental, to not be angry, to smile, to ‘get beyond’ whatever it is that is bothering us, ad nauseum. Getting past the unpleasantness can also include the death of a loved one or our own illnesses. We should ‘get on with our lives’. But what if you cannot do all of these things? Or what if you cannot do them fast enough? And what is fast enough? Who can define that for another person? Who would dare?

I know from personal experience that forgiving a person who has wronged you can take many years. I had to learn the hard way that anger and hatred are valid emotions, that you cannot ignore them or sweep them under the rug. I had to learn to face my anger and hatred. I had to learn to understand that my inability to express anger as a child and teenager had ripple effects in my early adulthood—I was betrayed by someone who ought to have known better since he called himself a Christian. The fact that I loved and trusted this person did not seem to matter much to him. The lesson I learned, I am glad I learned when I was in my early 20s instead of in middle age. It would be harder to bounce back now. It took me years to learn how to forgive him. I didn’t understand what was involved in forgiving another person at that time. I honestly didn’t think it would be possible or that it would ever happen. It was possible and it did happen—albeit many years later—after a lot of reading about how to tackle anger, how to express it, when to express it, what forgiveness is, what it involves, and so much more. Anyone who thinks learning how to deal with negative emotions is trivial, is wrong. It does not happen overnight, no matter how much wishful thinking is involved. Society wants quick fixes for everything that is broken—with no mess, no fuss, and no drama. The question is how did it get to be this way, and why is this preferable to an honest reaction and to living as honest an emotional life as possible?  

Fun on a Friday--'The Joy of Books' video

Loved loved loved this little video that's making the rounds on YouTube, about books coming to life in a bookstore after closing time. The accompanying music is a perfect match for the frolicking and fun. It's so wonderful to experience this kind of creativity. Made my day......(Friday the 13th, no less!)
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As it says in the end--"There's nothing quite like a real book". Enjoy! You can find the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SKVcQnyEIT8

and mentioned on a blog called The Scholarly Kitchen here:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/13/the-joy-of-books-a-short-inspired-film-full-of-passion/

and some information about who made the film and who did the music here:

http://keithlyons.me/2012/01/14/the-magic-of-books/

Brain food

I thought I would write a short post today about a blog I love reading and getting updates from via Twitter: The Scholarly Kitchen. It was established by the Society for Scholarly Publishing; I’ll let their written statement about their mission (found on the blogsite) tell their story for me.

--The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking." SSP established The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.
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The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog. Opinions on The Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers.—

I recently joined the Society for Scholarly Publishing because I was so impressed with their blog. The posts are clever and intelligently-written—reading them is like eating a gourmet meal—apropos their being a scholarly kitchen. You enjoy the meal and know you’ll come back for more. There is a panel of authors, whose professions vary from CEO/publisher of a medical journal to senior editor to associate dean to consultant—a broad spectrum of professionals who know what they’re talking about.

You won’t regret dining here: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/

Stream of consciousness for today

Running for the bus get to Inch hair salon methylparaben-free hair products Evelyn my hairdresser talking about American Horror Story talking about The Walking Dead talking about zombies talking about ghosts talking about dreams scaring us to death sitting in a chair waiting to get done listening to song You don't have to change is it Anneli Drecker yes it is (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1BNr4P_X3A) spacey music like the feeling flipping through photography book Richard Avedon great photographer Dovima model from the 1950s do you know her remember her remember Veruschka Twiggy so cool loved her as teenager Lauren Hutton Richard Gere American Gigolo good movie Andy Warhol Stephanie Seymour avant garde flipping through Elle magazine wondering who wears the clothes so strange looking at the hairstyles looking at the shoes new spring trend ankle socks spiky sandals models so thin anorexic nothing like Liz Taylor so beautiful flipping through Interiors book all the summer homes wooden insides by the sea streamlined kitchens peaceful for wealthy folk how much it costs how much we want do I want not really life simpler not many possessions not much debt walking home mild winter sun shining lovely day outdoors good feeling coming home writing working photos hobbies daily life feeling good feeling happy liking life brand new year

The privileges of power

I just had to comment on the latest development in the never-ending saga of the Oslo University hospital merger of four large city hospitals and the health enterprise Health Southeast that owns this hospital. The managing director of the latter, Bente Mikkelsen, made it into the news big-time during the weekend, when it was reported that she was planning to participate in a five-month long course on strategic leadership at the NATO Defense College in, of all places, Rome, Italy! The course was to start in February, and was to be paid for by the Defense Department (the reason for its involvement was not explained), whereas the cost of room and board would have been paid by her employer. The total cost of the course plus room and board was outrageously expensive. She was also to retain her regular salary during her leave of absence. According to one of my colleagues, she had been interviewed on TV and had said that she looked forward to sitting outside in the warm Rome sun and drinking a glass of wine (wouldn’t we all love to be doing that). Her decision to take this course and to leave her directorial duties behind her in Oslo for five months did not meet with much support among hospital personnel at any level. And I can report that she was the butt of derisive jokes the entire day. After a massive uproar on the part of the public and hospital personnel, she dropped her intention to take the course. But she offered no apology for her poor judgment and timing.

Why did this incident garner so much media attention? Because she was planning to hightail it out of Norway at exactly the time the newly-merged hospital needs her to be there to oversee the progress associated with the merger that she set in motion at the behest of the current ruling political party—a merger that has proven to be quite controversial, difficult to achieve, and one that will cost more money than it will save. As Jay Leno once said to Hugh Grant on national TV when the latter had been caught doing something naughty—what were you thinking? The same question applies here. The hospital runs with a huge budget deficit at present. While the rest of us are told to save money, while budgets are being cut and employees are being laid off, it was ok for the managing director to spend money on a NATO course (still no explanation as to why she needs this course) and to talk about how much she looked forward to enjoying the warmth of Italy. Talk about lack of emotional intelligence. I’m sure those employees who have recently lost their jobs were thrilled to read this. I’m sure they wished her well and were appropriately concerned for her career progression. By the way, the answer to the question what was she thinking is--she wasn’t.

A little update

I have a new personal website as of this past weekend: http://paulamdeangelis.wordpress.com/

The format of my photography blog has also been changed as of this past weekend: http://oftheangelsdesigns.wordpress.com/

Thanks for stopping by!

University of Oslo Science Library at night

I took some photos for the University of Oslo’s Science Library in December 2011. The library is in the process of consolidating eight separate science and math libraries into one large Science Library that will be moving into the newly-renovated Vilhelm Bjerknes’ building on the Blindern campus. I was asked to take some night photos outside the new building as well as to take some indoor photos on one of our inspection tours of the building. Here is one of my photos of the Science Library at night.

(update as of March 2012--this photo was used in an announcement for the official opening of the Science Library on March 12, 2012 that was published in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten)

Clearspeak

It happened again—I was reading the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten and flipping through the Culture section, when I came to the book review section. I came across a review of a new book by an (American) author. The nationality of the author doesn’t really matter for this discussion; what is important was that this was his third book, that his first book had been an amazing debut, and that it had sold very well. It had also been well-received critically. The small headline that introduced the actual review provided the following message (translated more or less literally from Norwegian): ‘only the mountains are the same as in the first book; nothing else achieves the heights that were achieved in the first novel’. Clear enough message, I thought—I expected to find a negative tone throughout the review. But no, quite the opposite. The reviewer used his column to praise the book, and ended his review by saying the following: ‘it is almost unthinkable that (the author) would be able to achieve the heights that he did with his debut novel, but with his new book he has shown that he didn’t just have one good book in him. This book is undoubtedly one of the year’s most important American books’. Why did this review irritate me, when it was in fact well-written and positive to the author? Because these types of reviews or newspaper articles are not uncommon these days. Because the introductory headline and the review itself were at odds with each other. Because the headline creates the anticipation of a negative review, when in fact it was not negative at all.

This is how I would have written the introductory headline: ‘despite the fact that the third novel does not live up to the standards set by the debut novel, the author’s third book is very good and will be one of the year’s most important books’. Nothing more and nothing less. You then know what you have to deal with when you read the review. Your expectations of praise and some criticism will be met. You will get a clear message of what the reviewer meant about the book.

I look for Clearspeak in most conversations and in most of what I read and listen to in the media these days. Unfortunately, I find that Clearspeak is in short supply. What is Clearspeak, you wonder. Clearspeak is the opposite of Obscurespeak, and even of Newspeak (a la George Orwell). It is the ability to express one’s thoughts and meanings clearly, so that your listeners and readers understand you. It is the ability to use words and vocabulary in an honest and direct (not necessarily politically-correct) way, again so that your listeners and readers understand you. It is not about being politically-correct or cowardly or any of those things. Clearspeak says—'I have an opinion or a specific meaning about something and I feel comfortable with expressing it clearly. I want you to know what I think'. Obscurespeak says—'I have an opinion or a specific meaning about something but I feel uncomfortable with expressing it clearly, so I will introduce a certain amount of confusion so that readers and listeners cannot ‘attack’ me for my opinions and meanings afterward. I’m not sure I really want you to know what I think. I am afraid'. Obscurespeak is obfuscation. It is also Safespeak—it protects the writer or speaker from being taken down or attacked, because your readers and listeners are too busy trying to figure out what it was you meant by what you wrote or said. Obscurespeak is the new language of huge bureaucracies as well, because if the average ordinary person actually started to understand what is written in the rules, regulations, tax laws, import laws, etc. he or she might actually start to ask some clear and direct questions that politicians wouldn’t want or be able to answer. Understanding how society and the government work might lead to grass-root revolutions and to an overthrow of politicians and bureaucrats who worship Obscurespeak and even Newspeak. Perhaps that day is coming and that is what they’re afraid of.

An excerpt from Fading Away, a short story I'm writing

........The marriage of her parents Frank and Anna had been marred by the sense of mission that her father felt in regard to keeping his siblings close and in frequent communication. Her father’s siblings had also grown apart like in Rob’s family, but theirs was a bitter and endless drama that eventually became a cold war. It had become his life’s purpose to reunite them, but he never really understood or accepted that he could not achieve this on his own. It would have required enormous good will from the six of them--three brothers: Frank, Eugene, and John, and three sisters: Colette, Maria, and Loretta--to accomplish that. They argued with each other from the early days in her parents’ marriage and prior to their marriage. The pattern was always the same-- argue over trivial things (to others but not to them), then slam the doors shut and close their hearts indefinitely to the very people with whom they had grown up, open up a bit again, perhaps on a whim, and then slam doors shut again for even longer. Eventually the doors slammed shut for good.......

 ........Perhaps they had cared about each other when they were children, or when they were adults and she wasn’t looking or paying so close attention. She remembered them as the creators of so much drama and sorrow in her youth. It colored her memories of growing up, the domestic family dramas, the melodramas, her aunt Colette and her husband Tom arguing at family get-togethers and her aunt locking herself in the bathroom and crying hysterically, or her other uncle, John, who was an alcoholic, who came home from his drinking bouts to his sister Helen, with whom he lived, and immediately started an argument with her to alleviate his fury over the misery that had become his life. He had been jilted at the altar, and Helen always offered up that little tidbit as the explanation for his behavior each time he went on the attack, but in truth, even when Lara was a teenager, she knew that he was sick and that he had trapped himself in alcohol and doomed his life to his dependency. She did not feel sorry for him, although his behavior never really stopped her from wanting to visit her uncle and his sister, until the end, when he lay in bed dying of his disease. She saw him as a person who ruined the few happy times when family had gathered together, and as a person who ruined lives. But hearts are large when you are young, she thought, and you think they will stay large and expand forever, and that they will continue to love and to forgive and to feel and to want, and then one day they don’t do any of those things anymore.........