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February 18, 2011
Coffee Meese
Happy Moose Cap Friday, everyone! I found two videos that include two of my favorite things: Meese (yes, that is the most fun plural form of Moose) and coffee. (Click "continue reading" to see the videos).
This one is kind of coffee porn.
Posted by Julie at 1:45 PM | TrackBack
February 16, 2011
En gave til mine fans
Det er som kjent ingen skam i å Google seg selv. Man kan finne ut mye rart, som for eksempel at E24s nye publiseringssystem tydeligvis samler alle artikler med min byline på denne siden.
Riktig nok kaller systemet disse artiklene for "kommentarer". Da jeg underviste en dobbelttime i norsk for en førsteklasse på videregående denne uken, var jeg nøye på at det å skille mellom kommentarjournalistikk og nyhetsjournalistikk er kjempeviktig. Så norsk-elever: Ingen av disse tekstene er kommentarer.
Går du litt langt tilbake i arkivet dukker det også opp artikler jeg ikke står for. Jeg har ikke skrevet om at norske skuespillere er trege til å ta i bruk Twitter eller at Anne B. Ragde synes Dennis Storhæi er kjekk. De er skrevet av en VG-journalist og desket av meg,
Men ellers, hvis du er en av de mange (selvtillit er fint) som oppsøker E24 kun for å lese mine ord, look no further.
Men da går du glipp av mye bra. Er du en ordentlig Julie-fan, må du også sjekke E24s forside regelmessig. Jeg er tross alt også forsideredigerer.
Les også: Greatest hits 2010
Posted by Julie at 2:22 PM | TrackBack
February 15, 2011
Extremely hot
I thought this was a sweet PostSecret. But realistically, the person receiving these coffee messages is either being completely oblivious or just politely ignoring them.
Posted by Julie at 12:18 PM | TrackBack
February 3, 2011
Lost
My back-up hard drive stopped working today. It won't turn on, and I don't know yet if the data on it was lost. Naturally, it's a back-up hard drive, so anything important on it is also somewhere else. But that's not the point.
The point is that I feel lost.
This was supposed to be the little box where my photos from Paris and my journal entries from the university years are safe, even if (ok, probably when) my beloved laptop gives up on me. And then the back-up died first. That which was supposed to keep me safe, turned out to be weak.
When I was a little girl, my dad showed me a picture book about what happened to people who didn't back up their files. They were eaten by monsters.
This was probably not a children's story, but a brochure designed to sell back-up software. I still grew up to be something of a digital hoarder. I once saved a text message for three years, transferring it from phone to phone. My digital music collection is obsessively organized, even though I usually just use Spotify. When a friend dropped his laptop on the floor, I asked him: "You had back-up right?" He told me that was the worst possible thing to say, and I felt quilty about if for weeks.
Now this loss, mere months after losing my RSS archive Bloglines, has made me paranoid. Are our files never safe? Between the cloud, where I am at the mercy of companies located on the other side of the world, and local storage, where technology just randomly dies, should I just learn to live archiveless? It's not like I want a physical archive.
And what if my laptop chooses this week to break down for ever?
If I were suddenly without files, would I be ok?
All the decent Paris photos are on Facebook. My best writing is published or e-mailed to someone. Most of my music is available either on Spotify or on some torrent site. I would mourn some of my favorite photographs and a few specific journal entries and writing experiments. And when the sheer inconvenience and missed deadlines blew over, I would be fine.
When I looked through the journal entries just two days ago, I found old documents that I have deleted from their original place on my laptop. Forgotten details of events that made such an impact on me that I wrote short story-ish accounts of them. Texts I liked enough to cut and paste from other blogs. Collages of party photos. Digital memories.
I don't need them, but I'm glad I looked through them. And just like I want to be able to read my journals from grade school (those notebooks are in a cardboard box in my parents' attic), I want to be able to read today's unbloggable personal writing ten years from now. Call me a hoarder, but at least I mainly hoard words.
So developers who want to make something upscale and sophisticated: Don't make me an app. I want the digital file version of those super secret bank vaults where they store treasure in the movies. I want to be able to tell someone: guard these files for generations; my great-great-grandchildren should be able to look at these photos and read these words.
Posted by Julie at 9:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 2, 2011
Bilingual infatuation
My Twitter followers want me to define love. Ok, here goes.
Last night, I posted a list of words missing from the English language, and one of them was "forelsket".
I woke up this morning to a list of @mentions on Twitter about the difference between the English "in love" and the Norwegian "forelsket".
Seriously, Twitter? You think I know the answer to that one? Well, I'll try.
In my head, "forelsket" is how you feel between just having a crush on someone and actually realizing you are in love with them.
I guess if I were to use both my languages to describe how love evolves, it would be something like this: I like someone in general (conveniently, same word in both languages), I have a crush (which at least one friend of mine has directly translated into English as "ha et knus"), I feel "forelsket", I fall in love. This doesn't necessarily happen in that order, but on a scale of not-serious to very-serious, that's how it works.
Is forelsket the same as infatuated? Not really. Infatuated implies silliness, irrationality and superficiality. "Forelskelse" is hardly rational, but it's not as stupid/crazy as infatuation. If I ever describe myself as infatuated, it's because I know I'm completely stupid and out-of-character, and that this insane crush will blow over any minute. On the other hand, I can be forelsket for a frightening amount of time.
When I listen to friends who only speak English or watch movies in English, and someone says "I think I'm in love", I think: "No dear, you're forelsket. You just don't have that word in your vocabulary, poor thing." I guess forelsket is that giddy, excited feeling that's telling you someone is very interesting. Forelskelse is when you have a theory that you might be able to fall in love with someone, but you just don't know them well enough to tell yet.
Privately, I think that all the words I know, in English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Khmer, Thai, Italian, Spanish*, are all one big vocabulary. Sometimes I can use all my words, sometimes only a few, depending on who I'm talking to.
I also appreciate the British verb "fancy" and the American "hooking up" (I interpret it as an intentionally ambivalent way of saying "Something physical happened, but I'm not going to give you any details."). I think the Norwegian "kjæreste" is more serious than the English "boyfriend/girlfriend". Saying "I love you" in English is nowhere near as big a deal as saying it in Norwegian.
Even when no one else agrees with my definitions (or even understands me at all), speaking two languages fluently gives me twice as many ways to think about everything. There are some feelings I can only express in English and some I can only express in Norwegian, but in my own thoughts, I can sort out my emotions using my whole vocabulary.
Related posts: Love in any language and I want to live in English
* I only speak two languages fluently, but I do know words in all of these languages. And the list looked cool.
Image: Premshree Pillai, Creative Commons
Posted by Julie at 1:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack