A commentary on pandemic mandates

This New Yorker cartoon by Peter Kuper from February 4th made me laugh. Perfect commentary on some of the pandemic-related stupidity we see around us. 

April news and updates

I was asked to write a short article in English for the Norwegian magazine Our Amazing Norway, which is a magazine written by expats for expats. It published its first issue in 2011. The topic I was asked to write about, interestingly enough (some of my friends might say ironically enough) was ‘figuring out the Norwegian workplace’, something I’ve written extensively about in this blog. Of course I haven’t figured out the Norwegian workplace completely nor have I figured out what Norwegian bosses want. It’s well nigh impossible to come to a complete understanding of either, firstly because there is no such thing as perfect knowledge, secondly—workplaces are different depending on whether you find yourself in the public or private sector, and that would be true in any country. But I was able to give some comments, ideas and tips about how to deal with a new workplace and a new boss in a foreign country.

The magazine itself deals with the daily lives of expats who find themselves in Norway, in a foreign country with very few guideposts on how to survive here if you are a newcomer. You’ve got to be tough and to figure most things out on your own—that was my experience when I moved here over twenty years ago. I wish this kind of magazine had been around when I first came to Norway; perhaps some of my ‘trials and tribulations’ would have been less in number, or less intense in degree, had I been able to read about how others tackled their new workplaces and a new country. The founder and publisher of Our Amazing Norway is Marius Slavinskas, himself an expat, originally from Lithuania. He’s lived in Norway for eighteen years and is married to another expat, an American from California. So we all have something in common—our expat experiences—and those are definitely worth sharing. We ‘speak the same language’, so to speak.  

Our Amazing Norway is published twice a year; my article will appear in the June issue. Check out the magazine online: http://www.ouramazingnorway.com/. They’re also on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ouramazingnorway. I’m so looking forward to the upcoming issue and to seeing my article there. I’ll let you know when the article is published; you will be able to purchase the issue if you so choose or perhaps you’d like to subscribe to the magazine.

I have other news that involves my photography, but I’ll save that for another post, after I find out a bit more of what type of project might be involved.

And finally, I am well into my novel about being an expat and my memories of growing up in Tarrytown and New York. I realized the other day that I finally understand the reason for my extensive photographic documentation of most aspects of my life and that of my family and friends since my early teen years. I was waiting for the day when I would write a novel about my life as an expat from New York. Many of those photos will find their way into my book, along with the stories that accompany them. I’ll update you about the novel’s progress from time to time.

'Don't know what you've got till it's gone'

I have been a regular subscriber to the weekly news magazine, Time, for at least thirty years, before I moved to Norway and since I moved here. I’ve looked forward each week to Time's news summaries and articles, film, book, music and theater reviews, and interesting tidbits that they toss in from time to time. You might think that it would be a problem to experience regular weekly delivery of Time; I can tell you that it’s been a pleasure to be a subscriber. Not once, I repeat, not once, have I ever had a problem with a missed issue or late delivery. I haven’t had to contact customer service for any problem whatsoever, except to renew my subscription, and that is also a problem-free experience, unlike other magazine and newspaper subscriptions that I have had since I moved to Oslo. That by itself is a miracle in this day and age—a magazine that manages to be timely, punctual, and service-minded.

What bothers me lately is that I’ve noticed that with each issue I receive in the mail, especially during the past half year, the magazine is shrinking. Each issue is thinner than the previous week’s issue. Given the fact that its competitor, Newsweek, stopped publishing the paper edition of its magazine at the end of last year (I refer you to Wikipedia for a more-detailed update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek), I have begun to wonder if Time is moving in the same direction. I hope this is not the case, but I have a gut feeling that it is. The end of the paper editions of these magazines doesn’t mean their total demise; in the case of Newsweek, they decided to focus their energies on an all-digital format, meaning that the internet has claimed yet another victim, in one sense. I don’t have a problem with internet; if used well and if you can filter through the morass of information that is available at every turn, you can in fact obtain a lot of useful information in the blink of an eye. I need only think of Wikipedia as I write this—useful, informative, updated, with mostly correct information (and they are honest about the ‘holes’ in their summaries, about what is lacking, and that’s a good thing). But there is something about opening the print issue of a magazine like Time when I get it, sitting down on the couch with a cup of coffee and reading it from cover to cover. I enjoy that very much; it’s not the same sitting down with my Kindle for iPad and reading the issue that way, even though I read books that I’ve downloaded on my Kindle for iPad from time to time. It’s just that I don’t want to see the end of all print publications, be they books or magazines.

And that brings me to my final point; with fewer books and magazines printed, there will be more bookstores that will go belly-up. One of the major American book retailers, Barnes and Noble, is struggling and on the verge of collapse, according to a recent article from Slate (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/02/14/barnes_noble_collapsing.html), and that makes me sad to read. Very sad. I have fond memories of the many hours spent in their bookstores; starting when I worked part-time as a stocker for a company on West 13^th Street in lower Manhattan during my graduate school days, and would spend my lunch hours perusing the bookshelves of the Barnes and Noble bookstore at 122 Fifth Avenue between 17th and 18th streets. I bought many a Christmas present there as I remember. And then later on, during the mid-1980s, when I would drive up from the Bronx where I lived at that time, to their bookstore on Central Avenue in Yonkers and wander around there for a few hours on a summer evening, looking at photo books of Princess Diana (who was all the rage then), or skimming books on why women are afraid of success in the business world, how to make your relationship better, or the meaning of dreams, in the self-help section. Those were weekly trips that I looked forward to, and I always left the store with one or two new books that I couldn’t wait to dive into. In later years, when I have visited my sister in upstate New York during the summer, we have had some fun driving to the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Poughkeepsie, where we would start off our visit with cappuccinos in the little café at the back of the bookstore. We would sit and chat for a while, and then wander the aisles in search of a book that would catch our eye. It was always fun to compare our current literary interests, talk about the books we had read or were reading, check out the different games and puzzles for sale, and so on. Sometimes my husband would call me from Norway while we were wandering around the store; we would be laughing at some silly thing, and he would get a chance to join in on the fun. Simple stuff, but simple stuff is the stuff of memories. Bookstores generally, and Barnes and Noble specifically, have been and are a large part of my life. I cannot imagine life without them. As Joni Mitchell sings ‘Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. But sometimes even when you do know, things disappear anyway, replaced by newer things, but in some cases, more sterile things. I will never be attached to a computer the way I have been attached to my books. And that’s not likely to change in my lifetime.