I haven’t
written too much about work lately, I guess because I’ve moved into a new phase
now at my workplace—the ‘wait and see’ phase. For the time being, my work life
seems to have evened out a bit. All that means is that I have found a new
research group to settle into and so far, so good. It feels good to be a part
of something to which I can contribute. I just hope this new group is allowed
to grow and flourish. One year ago, the other ‘new group’ that I was a part of
was just getting onto its feet and learning to get to know one another. And
then the end of 2011 came and that group went ‘poof’ and was no more. Management
decided to move the pawns around on the chess board once again, and came up
with new suggestions for new constellations. And of course they know best. The
uplifting part of these political scenarios is that they happen now in public
for all to see, so that it is no longer possible for my friends and colleagues
to say that they don’t believe me when I tell them how it is. They’re now
experiencing some of this personally and they don’t like the treatment either.
I’m a couple of years ahead of them, having graduated from anger to depression to
cynicism to healthy skepticism. ‘Trust no one’ as the main characters on the
X-Files used to say. In a work-related context, I’d say that’s where I am now.
Still like the research work I do, though. I just hate work politics, but they’re
part and parcel of the whole arena, in fact of most business arenas.
Mostly, I’ve
floated myself back into the world that I love the most after science—the world
of the creative arts--literature, movies, art, and music. That world always
fills me with hope and the feeling that I am being renewed—new beginnings
within myself. I’m reading again, listening to new music, appreciating art
where I find it, and going to the movies as often as I manage. Or renting DVDs
to catch up on the movies I’ve missed. I just read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and enjoyed it; he describes evil
behavior in mankind in a way that can chill you to the bone, and he does it in
a way that seems so ordinary. I’m currently reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and enjoying it immensely;
Olive is a prickly middle-aged woman but her life is so worth reading about—all
the different people who cross her path and who interact with her. I recommend
it. I got tickets to see Deadmau5 at
Oslo Spektrum concert stadium next week as I wrote about in my previous post;
in a few weeks I will see Sting at the
Norwegian Wood music festival in Frogner Park. I recently went to see the movies
Dark Shadows, Hunger Games and Martha Marcy May Marlene, and I got
tickets today for the opening night of Prometheus
(can’t wait!) next week. I’ve rented The
Rum Diary with Johnny Depp, and watched Source
Code and Another Earth (another
film I wrote about recently). All of them were good films, and all of them
inspire me in a way that no other art form can. I’m hooked on movies—always have
been and always will be. Some of you may ask where I find the time to do these
things—yes, I know and feel the time constraints all the time. The answer is
that I am making the time now. Again I ask, if not now, when? Academia can eat
up every spare minute of life including evenings and weekends, and I don’t want
that. So yes, I am choosing the creative world of the arts any chance I get, as
I’ve written about here in this blog many times before. It helps to balance out
the administrative, political and other demands of academia. The actual
research and experiments though are the creative part of science, when we are
actually permitted to pursue them. There is a lot of creativity in the world of
science research; the trick is to not get buried by all of the other demands
that eat up that creative time.
