Moments in time

This morning as we drove to work, we heard David Bowie’s new song, Where Are We Now?, on the radio. It caught my attention with its melancholy tone, and I commented to my husband that I would have loved the song immediately when I was a teenager, as I seemed to be drawn to all things sad at that time. Truth is, I loved the song immediately now too, so that tells me that I still am drawn to sadness, but in a more realistic way now than when I was younger. When I got to work, I found the recently-released video of the song on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9XsTnyN26Y&feature=share&list=FL4rKLincZWuFolZVFChzj5g. It is one of the most poignant, emotional and raw songs I have heard in a long time, and affected me in the way that such songs usually do. Got me to thinking about what he is singing about, which is his getting older and his reflections on his past. ‘A man lost in time’. But he is singing too about a moment in life and in time—‘the moment you know you know you know’--those fleeting moments when you are keenly aware of your own mortality, of time passing, when you know there is nothing you can do about it or about getting older, when you are aware of the paradoxes contained in life and thankful for them. They are moments when you are almost outside of yourself looking in—experiencing that moment when you know that you suddenly understand that you in fact understand where it’s all leading to. But he is also telling us that even though he is aware of moving toward life’s exit, he is also thankful for the sun and rain and fire—those things that tether us to daily life and which tell us that we are in fact still alive. There is hope as long as those things still exist for us. The song ends with him singing that ‘as long as there’s me, as long as there’s you’, that it will be alright, or at least as alright as it can be in the context of knowing that one day we will exit this earth. He is reminding himself that he can draw comfort from those thoughts and find the energy to go on, and hearing him sing that reminds me of the same, of the importance of love and of the support it can give us in dark times. A reasonably hopeful ending to a sad song. Art in all its many forms never ceases to amaze me, in that it shows us a way to live, a way to get through the bittersweet and dark moments that are part of life.

Living a balanced life

Apropos my last post--Finding Balance, the Adventure Center now has a blog, and one of their recent posts has to do with balance and living a balanced life. I encourage you to read the post--it's insightful and offers some ideas for how the future of our society could be shaped, starting with its children. If you'd like to read the post, you'll find it here: http://www.adventurecenterjourneysofwonder.org/1/post/2013/01/a-wish-as-we-enter-2013.html

Finding balance

It seems to me that the lines between our personal and work lives are becoming more and more blurred. They may not even exist for some people. I think much of it has to do with the prevalence of technology and social media and how easy these make connecting to others at all hours; we can be connected 24/7 to family and friends, so why not to colleagues and bosses as well? I know employees who can never let go of work, or vice versa--their bosses and workplaces can never let go of them. These employees leave their workplaces, go home, eat dinner, and work some more, sometimes right up until they go to sleep. Or they accept phone calls and answer text messages from bosses, colleagues and/or clients the entire evening. They never shut their phones off; they check their work emails constantly. They are on when they should be off; they are available to their workplaces when they should be doing other things. Those other things include having a personal life, a family life, a social life, a hobby or two, or doing volunteer work, or maybe just time out for meditation, relaxation, reading a good book or watching a film. The odd thing is that these people travel to an actual workplace each day; they do not work at home. Somehow they have a harder time physically and mentally separating themselves from their workplace than many of those I know who work at home or who work several days a week at home. I am not sure why that is; it would certainly be worth studying. It seems as though working at home forces those who do it to make rules for when they are available and when they are not, and they have learned to enforce those rules.

If a workplace expects the majority of its employees to be available at all hours or to finish work at home, I call that tyranny. Possible exceptions include high-level leaders in times of crisis. If employees cannot let go of their workplaces and must be connected to them and their work at all times, I call that idolatry, especially if there is a certain amount of arrogance attached to the worship of work. These are the people who could choose not to idolize their jobs, but they choose otherwise. Not being able to let go of work can also be a form of addiction. The latter can sneak up on employees after several months of taking work home because they are interested in finishing up an interesting project or because they want the answer to the question now. And taking work home every now and then, by choice, is much different than being forced to do so by your workplace. But over time, the results can be the same. Employees become slaves to their work and to their workplaces. They cannot put their work aside; it preoccupies them to the point of nervousness and anxiety, which is not healthy in the long run. This happened to me a number of times during the past twenty years, I would take work home and stay up to all hours in order to complete it. But what happened was that one project would get finished, and then two more would take its place, and so on. My point is that we will never be finished with our work. It will always be there waiting for us the next day. It is absolutely fine, totally ok, to pick up the next day where we left off the day before, after an evening of rest, relaxation and a good night’s sleep. It is important to have balance in our lives. More to the point, it is important to maintain balance in our lives, because it is so easily lost to or disturbed by workplace tyranny, idolatry, or addiction. And that means shutting off the phone, not looking at work emails, not 'checking in', and not being available; no matter how much it plagues us (or tyrannical workplaces) in the beginning. It means cutting the cord and not worshipping on the altar of work. The rewards are that we find ourselves again in the process of deprogramming ourselves, and we find balance in our lives. It does not mean that we no longer enjoy our work, rather that we enjoy it within the context of a balanced life. 

The future of scientific publishing

Open Access (OA) is in the wind these days, especially if you work in academia and publish articles as part of your research work. If you work at a university or are a student there, you will come across the term Open Access. What is Open Access? Wikipedia provides a very good definition; I urge you to read their page about Open Access—it will give you a good background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access. Open Access is ‘the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles’. Simply put, it means that if you as a potential reader (whether you work at a university or not) find a scientific or medical article of interest online that you’d like to read, that you can click on the link to that article and read it online or download it for future reading from the website of the journal that published it. You may think this is common practice and not problematic; neither are true. You may not have considered what underlies your being allowed to access an article online if you are a student or researcher at a university. Your access to those articles is not necessarily ‘open’, or traditionally has not been open. That is because most published articles are closed access publications in non-OA subscription-based journals; they have been published in a specific journal, and that journal restricts access to a published article by making individual readers pay for the privilege of accessing it, if you are not working at a university. Or they make university libraries pay exorbitant subscription fees in order to provide online access to those articles and/or print copies containing those articles to students and academics at all levels.

Many people know little to nothing about OA, or if they’ve heard about it, it’s not something to which they’ve paid much attention. That’s understandable, since unless you have a career in academic research science where your research work can be published in a journal of some sort, you’re not likely to care too much about the scientific publishing process or about how much it costs to publish an article these days or about how much it can cost to access that published article afterwards. There are even academics who know very little about it, taking for granted that their published articles are accessible to all who are interested, or that they will have access to published articles that they are interested in. What some of them haven’t understood is that the university libraries have ensured that they have had access to innumerable journals in their fields of interest—chemistry, biology, physics, medicine, geology, etc. up to this point. This is because the libraries have paid costly subscription fees to gain online access and/or to receive print copies of the journals. These subscriptions are part of their annual budgets. This system has been in place for many years.

As a scientist, I am interested in promoting Open Access publishing, for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, I believe it is the future of scientific publishing, and I’d like the future to be here now. (I also believe that self-publishing is the future if you want to publish your own books; it allows you to bypass traditional publishing houses that mostly reject first-time authors. I wrote a post about that in 2010: http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.no/2010/08/publish-your-book-using-createspace.html). We academics already do most of the prep work before we submit our scientific articles, prep work that was previously done by the journals; we format the text and prepare figures and tables according to guidelines provided by the journal, we upload those formatted files to the journal website, and we edit the compiled version of the article that the journal provides to us after receiving the uploaded files. In other words, we now do much of the work that the journals used to do for us before; they are not doing us any favors. If you’ve ever submitted an article online for publication, you will know what I’m talking about; the process is not for sissies. In addition, we often pay just to submit our articles to a journal, even to a journal that the university library already subscribes to (e.g. Cancer Research) although not all journals have this requirement. We also must pay page charges if we want color figures, or if our article goes over the page limit. We must pay to get reprints of an article or pay to receive a pdf version of our article created by the journal that represents the final published version. If you choose to receive a pdf file of the published article, you are not allowed by the journal to distribute free copies of your published article to those who might want to read it. For that privilege, you are expected to pay for journal reprints. It’s a costly business for many scientists, whose budgets continue to dwindle with each year that passes.  

I chose to publish one of my scientific articles in the OA journal Molecular Cancer already back in 2004; that’s how strongly I believed in the future of OA publishing then, and still do now. Gold OA journals provide immediate access to your published article on their websites; Molecular Cancer is one of the journals offered by BioMed Central, which is the first OA science publisher (started up in 2000) and one of the largest in the world. You as a potential reader do not have to pay them to access my article; I do not have to pay them for permission to distribute my article freely to whomever I choose. In fact, I am including the link to my 2004 article here, if you’d like to read it: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-3-11.pdf.

I chose to publish in Molecular Cancer again in 2006 because I had had such a good experience with them in 2004; here is the link to that article: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-5-20.pdf. This article, by the way, is a highly-accessed article (yes, you get to know the statistics for your article—how many times it’s been accessed/downloaded, and when—quite useful). That makes me feel pretty good, because I know that the work is solid and that the data are quite interesting.

I use the word ‘chose’; the fact is that my articles went through rigorous peer review before they were accepted for publication. There is NO guarantee that your article will automatically be accepted for publication in an OA journal; there is still editorial and peer review to go through. I have had a total of three articles to date published in OA journals (the third one a collaborative effort with Italian colleagues in 2009: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-8-55.pdf). But I have also had two articles that were not accepted for publication in this journal. That has not discouraged me. It merely reinforces my opinion that the OA system works just as well as traditional non-OA publishing; it is not ‘easier’ to get published in OA journals than in non-OA journals. There are good OA journals and poor quality OA journals, just as there are good and bad non-OA journals. The impact factor for Molecular Cancer is 3.99, pretty good—around the middle of the scale. But I don’t worry too much about impact factor, even though most of my peers do and even though we are encouraged to do so by our workplaces; I am more concerned with reaching potential readers and making my work accessible to a larger public. Because of course the potential reach is global. I probably should care more about impact factor, because it gets your research ‘noticed’ and funded by granting agencies—the more publications you have in high impact-factor non-OA subscription-based journals (like Nature and Science), the better your chances of getting your research projects funded. These are the ‘eye of the needle’ journals—only an elite few ever get to publish here. And the reasons for that could fill another blog post. To give an example of how non-OA journals make it difficult to get access to articles, check out this article in Science magazine; if you want to access and/or to download it, you have to pay for that privilege: 
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/303, unless you work or study at a university that subscribes to this journal. As far as I'm concerned, this is an incredibly old-fashioned and elitist way of doing things. 

Is OA publishing free for authors? Not necessarily, but it can be if the university or institution you work for is a member institution. I refer you to the ‘article-processing charges FAQ’ page on the BioMed Central website; it explains this aspect better than I can: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/about/apcfaq. The major and most important point for pushing for open access journals is that once research articles are published in them, they are immediately and freely-accessible to anyone in the world who wants to access them. That is not the case for non-OA subscription-based journals.  

If you would like to read more about Open Access, I recommend the following websites:

·         Open Access http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

·         Directory of Open Access journals http://www.doaj.org/

·         Open Access Directory http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page

·         The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020961

·         Video describing Open Access http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#015

Favorite songs from the 1980s

Rambling down music memory lane today. This time in the form of my favorite music from the 1980s. I have to admit that the 1980s was an odd time music-wise—disco, urban, pop, rock, jazz—each genre got airplay on the New York radio stations, if memory serves me right. So many great songs…..

Anyway, here are some favorites from that time; check out the many videos on YouTube if you want to hear them. I’ve tried posting video links before but they disappear pretty fast from YouTube and end up as dead links on my posts. I’ll be updating the list from time to time as I remember more songs, listen to them once again, and am thrown back to that time--where I was, what I was doing, and who I was with when those songs made such a lasting impression on me.

·         Street Life -- The Crusaders (released in 1979 but got a lot of airplay in 1980)

·         Off the Wall – Michael Jackson (1980)

·         Don’t Stand So Close To Me, Driven to Tears, When the World is Running Down You Make the Best  of What’s Still Around – The Police (1980)

·         Give Me The Night – George Benson (1980)

·         Are You Going With Me, The Bat – Pat Metheny (1981)

·         More Than This, Avalon -- Roxy Music (1982)

·         Stepping Out -- Joe Jackson (1982)

·         Thriller, Beat It, Human Nature, Want To Be Starting Something – Michael Jackson (1982)

·         Physical Attraction – Madonna (1983)

·         Burning Down the House – Talking Heads (1983)

·         One Thing Leads to Another, Saved by Zero – The Fixx (1983)

·         White Lines (Don't Don't Do It) – Grandmaster Melle Mel (1983)

·         Heartbeat City, Magic, Drive, Why Can’t I Have You -- The Cars (1984)

·         When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy – Prince (1984)

·         Dance Hall Days, Don’t Let Go – Wang Chung (1984)

·         West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys (1984)

·         Jump – Van Halen (1984)

·         Vidro e Corte (Glass and Cut) – Milton Nascimento & Pat Metheny (1985)

·         In My House – Mary Jane Girls (1985)

·         Don’t You Forget About Me – Simple Minds (1985)

·         Live To Tell – Madonna (1986)

·         Everybody Have Fun Tonight – Wang Chung (1986)

·         Dancing on the Ceiling – Lionel Richie (1986)

·         Word Up, Candy – Cameo (1986)

·         Tunnel of Love – Bruce Springsteen (1987)

·         Last Train Home – Pat Metheny (1987)

·         Chicago Song – David Sanborne (1987)

·         So Emotional – Whitney Houston (1987)

·         Sign o’ the Times – Prince (1987)

·         In God’s Country, Where the Streets Have No Name – U2 (1987)

·         What I Am – Edie Brickell and New Bohemians (1988)

·         Buffalo Stance – Ninah Cherry (1988)

·         Free Fallin’ – Tom Petty (1989)

·         Back to Life (However Do You Want Me), Keep on Moving -- Soul II Soul (1989)

The great divide

I notice more and more how purportedly classless (egalitarian) societies, like the one I live in, struggle with the reality that not all of its members enjoy materialistic equality. It becomes more apparent to me each day, especially as this country gets richer due to its oil money. All individuals living in this society have gotten richer during the past ten years, yes, but some individuals have achieved a higher level of wealth than others. Not all people make the same amounts of money nor do they own the same numbers and types of homes and cars. They are not equal in the materialistic sense, no matter how hard the government tries to make it so. And that will likely always be the case. A perfect utopian society on this earth seems unlikely (the notion has been around for many years)—a society where all members have exactly the same level of wealth, status, or material possessions. A society where all members have equal opportunities for public education and the same legal rights is achievable. But there is no guarantee that even if all children have the same opportunities from birth, that they will grow up to earn exactly the same amounts of money, or be similarly educated, ambitious, talented, hard-working, creative, innovative, or that they will behave in similar ways in any given situation. Society consists of unique individuals, and that uniqueness begins at birth. People will utilize their talents and gifts in different ways compared to all others around them, and that will inevitably lead to different career choices with the resultant income disparities. Not all types of work are rewarded with similar incomes; perhaps that reality lies in the future. Imagine a society with no salary differences whatsoever. That would change the way in which education is viewed, as well as how career progression is viewed.

But it is the definitions of rich and wealth in the materialistic sense that interest me. One hundred people gathered together in one room might not be able to come up with a working definition of ‘rich’ or ‘wealth’. Some people will define ‘rich’ or ‘wealth’ as owning one home and one car, whereas others consider themselves rich if they are able to rent an apartment and not own a car, but perhaps use their money to travel, while others require a home and a summer cottage, and several cars and maybe even a boat in order to feel as though they have achieved the requisite level of wealth. Some people will say that they are rich if they have freedom to do as they like and can come and go as they please; they may not be interested in owning many material possessions. So what then is the definition of ‘poor’? Individuals who rent an apartment and do not own a car, a vacation cottage or an expensive boat—are they to be considered poor if they are content with their economic situation? Can society force that definition upon them? To me these are difficult questions to ponder, let alone answer.

There seems to be a lot more envy now in society than I can remember from when I grew up. You need only look at a newspaper to understand that; if the rich open their mouths and tell the less rich how to live or what to do, or if they in any way go overboard in terms of flaunting their wealth, the less rich will tell them in no uncertain terms to shut up or try to take them down a few notches, again using the media to do so. But they do it in a way that smacks of envy.

Perhaps globalization and a relentless media have made us more aware of the haves and the have-nots. We again need only turn to the media for them to tell us how the rich live; all the gory details are there for our perusal. The danger is that constant immersion in the media-created focus on wealth fosters a false sense of reality--that all people can achieve wild levels of wealth, if only…….And who knows if this way of thinking has contributed to high levels of personal debt—in the craze to have as many material possessions as possible, even if it means personal ruin.

We've come a long way?

I like to think that the status of women in the world has evolved and gotten better since when I was a child. Certainly that seems to be the case when one looks at the number of women in the workforce at present compared to that number in my mother’s generation. 'We’ve come a long way, baby' as the old Virginia Slims cigarette TV ad used to tell us. We have much more independence and mobility than our mothers did; we are better educated, and many of us are financially secure and able to take care of ourselves. Marriage is no longer necessarily viewed as the best way for a woman to achieve financial security, and single women are no longer labeled as unsuccessful because they are not together with a man. However, old ideas die hard in some societies, so you will find men and women in modern societies who will defend the old ways of doing things—women should be married to men who are the breadwinners, and they should stay home and take care of the house and family. They should not be pursuing careers or earning more money than their husbands. Overall however, there has been progress since I was a child, and it makes me happy to see that; it gives me hope for the future.

But we are often lulled into a false sense of security concerning women’s rights and status; we assume that equality and balance have been achieved, when in fact they have not. Something happens to burst the bubble and forces us to face the fact that many women in this world suffer injustice every day of their lives, regardless of the society they live in—modern, aware, and flexible, or old-style and rigid. Psychological abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual harassment, rape, arranged marriage against their will, societal clamping down on the rights of women in the form of telling them how to act, speak or dress—all of these point toward a hatred of women that seems to be increasing in the world we live in. Recently, there have been several prominent displays of misogyny that have been well-covered by the media. I need only read about the recent rape, mutilation and murder of a young woman in New Delhi India, or about the young Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to say that girls should be able to get an education, or about the fifteen year old girl whose parents sold her into marriage to a ninety year old man in Saudi Arabia. But it’s not just in these cultures where misogyny is rampant, even though these particular incidents are truly horrific. Take a look at our own ‘modern’ societies—women strangled by abusive husbands (as just recently happened in the town where I grew up); physical abuse of women (hitting, battering) at the hands of insecure men who do not want their wives or girlfriends to be better educated or more informed than they are; women married to abusive alcoholic men who destroy not only their lives but those of their children as well (in yet another tale of a young woman with a child who needs to leave her abuser but who ‘loves’ him and thinks he will change if only she loves him well enough). Psychological and verbal abuse in the form of mind games, emotional blackmail, sexual harassment, rude or threatening behavior, being frozen out, lack of praise or acknowledgment of any kind; this can go on in intimate personal relationships, but also in modern workplaces—I have witnessed such behavior during my thirty years in the workplace, and it is more frequent than you might think or want to believe. No matter how often I hear that women also abuse men, even if that is true, you need only take a look at statistics in order to find the truth—that far many more men abuse and kill women than vice versa. It is further proof that men retain the bulk of power in this world, that many of them do not want to relinquish that power, and that women have much work ahead of them before they have truly achieved equality and balance in personal and work relationships. I hope I see that day in my lifetime. It would make me incredibly happy to see that women become truly valued for who they are, not for their monetary worth as property to men or to their families. In the meantime, both men and women need to work together to create a world society that values women as much as it does men. Until that happens, the world will not be a safe place for women to live in. And a world that is not safe for women to live in, will ultimately become an unpleasant world for men to live in as well. We cannot rule out that perhaps one day, women will rise up en masse against their abusers, attackers, rapists and harassers. It will be interesting to see the outcome of such an uprising. I hope I see that in my lifetime as well.  

New Year's Eve in Oslo

At the end of each year, on New Year's Eve, Oslo inhabitants celebrate the arrival of the new year by setting off fireworks. This has been going on since I arrived in Oslo some twenty odd years ago. It's one of the highlights of New Year's Eve in my book. We never did this on New Year's Eve when I was growing up in Tarrytown. Fireworks were usually reserved for Fourth of July celebrations, but I know that you can go into New York City to watch fireworks on New Year's Eve; I'm not sure how long that has been going on. In our Oslo neighborhood, crowds of people, young and old alike, gather near the Akerselva river, on the bridge near the Hønsa Lovisa house. Some of them are there to watch, others are there to set off fireworks. Many people are holding bottles of champagne and glasses so that they can drink a toast to the new year with their loved ones and friends. The fireworks start right before midnight, and continue for about fifteen minutes. In later years, the city of Oslo has also sponsored a spectacular fireworks display down at the harbor, and that draws thousands of people. We haven't gone down to the harbor to watch them; we can actually see them fairly well, if the night is clear, from where we live. I enjoy watching the fireworks displays in our neighborhood. Here are some photos of them. Enjoy, and a happy new year to you all!

Winter comes to Norway

Scenic Elverum

Icicle formations

Snowy road in Elverum

Snowy Oslo

Trees in Ullevålsveien

Vår Frelsers gravlund (cemetery)

City pigeon

View of St. Olav's Catholic church (hospital to the left)

right before sunrise

Winter sunrise

Christmas potpourri

So many wonderful fragrances and colors at Christmas time, starting with the wonderful evergreen fragrance that emanates from the Christmas tree. Every time you walk through the front door, the first smell you smell is the Christmas tree. This year there were several new ornaments that joined the ornament fold, and they were a welcome sight on the tree.

And then there are the Christmas flowers--amaryllises and poinsettias--so beautiful to look at as they grow and flower during December. This year our three amaryllises had three different colors, white, red, and white with red stripes.

My indoor orange tree produced over sixty small oranges this year; the tree 'casts' the oranges to the floor when they are ripe, quite funny to witness and to listen to when sitting in our living room, as you can hear them rolling along the floor before they hit a piece of furniture. These small fragrant oranges find their way into the smoothies we make each morning.

And as far as fragrances go, I have to mention the Christmas food--especially the smell of boneless pork ribs rolled in and roasted together with garlic, fennel seed, rosemary, sage and thyme that we ate for dinner on Christmas Day, served together with a potpourri of vegetables (eggplant, squash cherry tomatoes, and potatoes). The pork tasted as good as it smelled while roasting in the oven.

Also made duck with orange sauce for Christmas Eve, served together with asparagus, broccoli and orange pieces; it too was very good and very colorful.

Other dinners have included boiled cod one evening, and elk steak another evening, and we're not done yet--my husband will be making salted sheep ribs for New Year's Eve. We've eaten some good cakes and desserts as well--Italian panettone, homemade gingerbread cookies, and orange mousse, among others.

Always a special time of year--Christmas with its food, desserts, trees, ornaments, decorations and flowers. We prepare for it, we enjoy its coming, and we accept its passing, because it moves us into a new year with fresh expectations and challenges. The Christmas season is about honoring our individual traditions (in our home, both American and Norwegian), our family heritage, home and family, our faith, as well as about visits with friends, and having the time to enjoy and to truly appreciate them all.

A Christmas poem

I have been writing poetry for years, and just recently came upon this poem that I wrote when I was a teenager. I thought it might be a good poem for the Christmas season. 

Silent Stars

Wander across sea and sky--

Stars nightborne in flight.

Carry on across all time--

Centuries ago began your light.

Go on and move into the night.

Your silence is heard then,

Your light has touched all men.

And once upon ago two thousand years,

You shone upon no ordinary man. 

copyright 2011 Parables and Voices
P.M. De Angelis

The gift of time

I’ve been enjoying the preparation time for the Christmas holiday, as I always do. There is something about Advent, the spiritual preparation for Christmas, as well as the material preparations in the form of purchases of gifts and food. I am always reminded of how privileged we are at this time of year especially. We have what we need and more. It is actually becoming quite difficult to know what to tell others when they ask what I want for Christmas. And that is true of very many people I know. We don’t really need much more than we have in the materialistic sense. Of course it’s always nice to give and to receive gifts—that’s part of the holiday spirit and what the season is about—but it’s not about how much gifts cost. It’s the thought that counts; we think of others and they think of us. My colleagues and I exchange small gifts each year (we’ve been doing this for years now)—spice tea, Christmas candy, small Christmas decorations, candle-holders, and the like. There have also been a lot of get-togethers with friends this month; I’ve preferred these personal gatherings to the impersonal Christmas work parties, which are usually too large and too loud. Always nice to get together for dinner for a few hours with good friends, or for a coffee break--with time to indulge in good conversation, something that is worth gold in these days of quick efficient communication and rushed activities.  

The gift of time. If we manage to give that to each other, we’ve accomplished something of worth. I think it is the best gift we can give each other. To know that someone wants to take the time to meet us, to spend a few hours with us, to go deeper than surface conversation—those are amazing gifts. I think more people need to know that they are valued by others. Unfortunately, sometimes even in the best of circumstances, there are some who do not feel worthy of the attention of others. They are good people, special people, kind people, but they suffer from lack of self-confidence that holds them back and makes them choose what is often not good for them. I can think of two instances where this is the case, both involving young people. My hope for them is that the warmth of the Christmas season seeps into them and makes them truly understand how much they are loved. 

Living on crumbs

It occurred to me this past week that perhaps abusive workplaces damage employees in more ways than we care to admit. After several recent conversations with colleagues and friends, I can only conclude that this seems to be the case. The type of abusive workplace I am talking about has little to do with physical abuse, although I know that occurs in some workplaces. The most common type of abuse is psychological and emotional, and I firmly believe that years of this type of abuse will damage the recipients, much as a psychologically abusive personal relationship does. And the damage may not be reversible. That is the frightening part. We don’t like to talk about this, but just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. The recipients of the abuse may carry their feelings of fear, shame, guilt and loss of self-esteem home with them, and take it out on the people with whom they live. Or if they live alone, they may take it out on themselves by living in unhealthy ways. Whatever the situation, the abuse leaves deep scars, and the employees who have experienced this type of abuse may not be able to leave their work situations, in the same way as an abused spouse may be unable to leave his or her situation. There may be no energy left to do so, or to fight back, or to deal with the situation.

What type of abuse am I talking about? Bullying, derision, grandstanding always at the expense of others, total disregard for the feelings of others, lack of emotional intelligence, verbal aggression, cursing, domination of meetings or conversations by the same people who flatten anyone who tries to get a word in, freezing out specific employees, being negative to what specific employees suggest no matter what the situation, deriding ideas during brainstorming meetings, making employees feel like crap, embarrassing or harassing them publicly (telling employees, ‘if you don’t like it, leave’ or telling employees that they’re lazy or mediocre in a public meeting). The list is endless. Have I seen such behavior in workplaces? Yes I have. What does an abusive workplace do to its employees? What are the scars it leaves on them? I would suggest that it creates a pattern of hope and disappointment that becomes cyclical. In the hope cycle, employees experience a feeling of being uplifted, perhaps because a boss has acknowledged their work for once. I call the experience being ‘grateful for crumbs’. In this case, the crumbs can be, for example, a very infrequent acknowledgment of employees’ work (or existence) in an environment that otherwise criticizes or ignores its employees. In the disappointment cycle, employees feel that their situation is hopeless and that there is little possibility of change. And then comes the hope cycle that brings with it that feeling that change is possible. This is very similar to an abusive relationship—between spouses, or between children and parents, between siblings, and so on.

You can imagine how children would develop in a home environment where parents were critical of and negative about most things they did, and only occasionally ‘threw a dog a bone’. That’s living on crumbs. Or parents who ignore their children, except to ‘show them off’ to others when it’s time to be politically correct. Children are highly sensitive to parental behavior, and they will work overtime to try to ‘read’ their parents. The appreciation of ‘crumbs’ becomes learned behavior after a while, but the recipients of abusive behavior are so focused on trying to ‘please’, that growth in other areas becomes stifled or stunted. They never completely learn self confidence, they become afraid of authority, or they became afraid to voice their opinions or ideas for fear of being derided, yelled at, or embarrassed publicly. The scars persist well into adulthood. The mistake we make as a society is to think that adults can tackle everything that is thrown at them, just because they are adults. The assumption is automatically that they have to tackle everything. What happens when or if they cannot? I’ve seen one example of that recently—someone who hit the wall big-time. There are bullies in the workplace, just as there were on the school playground. When the bullies get control of the workplace, the employees who get beaten up are often the ones who may not have had a lot of self confidence to begin with. Or they may be the ones who are living on crumbs in personal situations as well. Or they may have self confidence, but were raised to not question authority, to not stick their heads up. So if they are unfairly treated, there is no real recourse for them. They are not the ones likely to go over the boss’ head to complain to the higher-ups.

I have been told sometimes that I bring up problems but that I don’t discuss the solutions for them. That may be the case at times, but it may be the case simply because I don’t know what the solutions are. What do you do if you are an older man, for example, whose workplace bullies him, whose wife is sick, whose children depend on him, who knows that his chances of finding another job are next to null at his age? What then? What do you tell that person? Go find another job? Think positive and it will all work out? Blame him for his situation? And even if he is partly to blame, because he has let himself be satisfied with crumbs for many years, how does it help him if society blames him for his entire situation? We like to think that this is not a common situation; the fact is, in my father’s generation, this was a quite common scenario, at least where I grew up. It’s so easy to judge others, and in the end, ourselves. We are often as hard on ourselves as we are on others. The key word is hard. Maybe things would change if more people practiced being softer. Kindness is so underrated. We need more of it in society, in workplaces and in homes. Perhaps the next time a boss is abusive, we need to remind him or her of the value of being kind. That’s at least one solution I can suggest; I have no idea if it will work.  

Fear of the dark and of the creatures that live there

An interesting discussion this past weekend with some friends who were visiting—we ended up talking about the horror movies that have scared us the most. All of us are adults, and all of us ended up being scared, as in many sleepless nights after having viewed them. Scared as in lights on in all rooms of the house when alone, creepy images that seem to be imprinted on our brains forever—that sort of thing. The Grudge, The Ring, and I Am Legend were the films mentioned by several people, and it occurred to me that what these films all have in common are characters that are hideously deformed or grotesque in some way. In The Grudge and The Ring, female characters have been transformed into evil creatures with long dark hair that covers their faces, but when those faces are exposed, they are terrifying. They also have a tendency to glide along hallway walls or to crawl down stairs, and they have a nasty habit of appearing where you would least want them to turn up—in your bed or in an elevator. The shock value alone of having seen them is enough to make you want to sleep with all the lights on for many nights afterwards. The use of children in horror films can also be quite shocking—children who become evil, possessed children, little monsters--as in Children of the Damned; this offends our sense of normalcy. It’s not supposed to be that way. What scares us in I Am Legend are the humanoid monsters with superhuman strength (vampires in the novella by Richard Matheson on which the film was based) who roam the streets of the city by the thousands at night looking for prey. They can scale the outer walls of buildings and cross a city park in record speed, screeching and growling. But they cannot tolerate the light of day, which gives the protagonist (in this film Will Smith) the daylight hours to do the things he must do—find food and fuel for his car, and try to find other survivors like himself. But he must be home by sunset in order to lock down his house so that these creatures cannot find him or get inside his house. But of course you know they will at some point, and that he will make a mistake that will allow them to do so, and that is what is scary—when will it happen? It’s only a question of time. We can empathize with the protagonist; what would we do if we were in his shoes? How would we survive, and would we? Or would we go mad?

When I was a child, I thought that if I concentrated hard enough, I could create the imaginary creatures that scared me. Just that thought alone, that I might have the power to create those creatures, scared me. Where did those scary creatures come from? Perhaps from the fairytales that were read to us as children—among them Grimm’s fairytales about witches (Hansel and Gretel; Snow White), wolves (Little Red Riding Hood) and other odd and sometimes evil creatures. Perhaps they also came from our religious education that taught us about God and the Devil. They did not come from TV or films, as my parents did not purchase a TV until I was almost thirteen years old; I did not start going to movies until I was in my early teens. When I was a teenager, I was sure that by the time I reached adulthood, I would no longer be scared when watching horror or supernatural films. That has not proven to be the case. I need only think of The Shining, I Am Legend, The Grudge, The Exorcist, REC, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (the original TV movie), Burnt Offerings, and a number of other films in this genre, to remind myself of the effect they had on me upon first viewing. I think that fears of the dark or of monsters in the closet or under the bed are primal fears; we do not see well in the dark, whereas our predators (mostly carnivorous animals in early times) did. They had the advantage. So we built shelters to keep them out and used fire to allow us to see but also to keep predators away. We are thankful for the protection of our modern homes—with doors and windows we can lock against anything or anybody that might want to hurt us. We turn on our alarm systems to be warned if an intruder breaks in. But what happens if the intruder is not human? If we keep the lights on, will that keep the non-human intruders away? What scares us is the possibility that our ‘protections’ are merely illusions—can locked doors and windows keep out things that really want to get in? Our locks, alarm systems and indoor lighting cannot protect us against supernatural threats. Films like Paranormal Activity, The Entity, and The Exorcist scare us exactly for this reason. And what happens if people become possessed by evil spirits, as happened in The Shining or in so many other supernatural horror films? How do you fight that type of evil? In the final analysis, perhaps horror films in general make us thankful for the good old routine daily life that we live; we do not have to fight off predators on a daily basis, nor do we have to hunt our own food. Most of us living in industrialized societies do not have to risk our lives each day in order to survive. 

Rainbow in the Akerselva river

I took this video last month on one of my weekend walking tours along the Akerselva river. A lovely autumn day, the rushing water of the river, the spray dancing above the water, catching the sunlight, and suddenly--a rainbow. A lot of people were taking photos of the river that day. Enjoy........