Category: Rambles and rants

I know, you’re probably thinking “Huh?”

Well, despite not really being into sports (a good candidate for understatement of the year if ever I saw one), I end up watching sports accidentally ever so often (or, if I can help it, seldom, but never mind). One such occasion occured last Saturday – we popped in to Three Lions for luch (and a pint) before the show (Ice Age 2, as reported), and realised pretty quickly that we’d either have to watch football og go somewhere else. We opted for the football (I mean, where else is there?). It was, uhm, bear with me, I’ll remember in a mo… I think it was Everton vs. Liverpool. I also think I opted to root for Everton (sorry, Pondus), though that left me in a minority in the audience (actually, I suppose you could say I opted to root for Everton because it left me in a minority). It didn’t really make much difference, as we were going to have to leave at half time to make the cinema on time. We didn’t miss the half time entertainment, though, Will got his head shaved as a result of loosing a bet he’d made that Chelsea wouldn’t win anything at all this season (or something of that order, you can’t expect me to come up with correct team names and events every time, you know). That was fun.

Anyway, on with the musing and the original purpose of this post: With football there is this big hoo-ha about the offside rule and how it’s supposed to be so difficult to understand, especially if you’re a woman. Now, don’t get me wrong, when I do, on occasion, watch football, I can’t necessarily tell whether a player is “offside”, in that I sometimes get quite surprised when the whistle is blown or whatever. This comes – I suspect – of there being a lot of players on the field and me only being half-way interested (and more interested in whether Team A’s right forward is better looking than Team B’s back and whether that means I really should be rooting for Team A). But the rule in itself and the reason the rule exists seems straightforeward enough. For the purpose of discussion I found an explanation here – now, tell me, what’s so terribly complicated? I suppose the phrase “in the opinion of the referee” makes it somewhat more iffy than a simple “unless you’re the goalkeeper you should keep your hands off the ball”, but still. What am I missing?

So much for the ramble, now for a little rant…

I need a new bag. My favourite all-round bag has a zipper that no longer works every time, which is a pain. (In fact, I’m never buying a Bj

March starts in two days and we’ve just had another shitload of snow. Winter’s over, you hear me? OVER! No more snow, please!

I had a “what’s wrong with young people nowadays?” moment yesterday. I’ll get to that eventually, first an update:

Because I obviously have too much spare time on my hands (ha!) I’ve signed up for a couple of subject – one at the department where I work and one in English studies. The former promises to be both interesting and useful if I can manage to get enough work done on it to actually pass the exam. The latter was the only class this semester at my old department that looked vaguely interesting, and I thought it would be nice to get back to English literature and to possibly get in touch with the department again in case I ever manage to do something about this doctoral thesis I’ve been contemplating for the last 8 years. (Phew, long sentence.)

This latter class is entitled “Working class fiction” and is supposed to deal both with social history and literature. Sounds promising, no? Actually, it was one of only two classes where I hadn’t read most of the set texts already, and the other was on Native American fiction, and while that might be very well it’s A: way off my chosen field hypothetical-thesis-wise and B: twice the workload (and I really didn’t need that). A brush-up on D.H. Lawrence and an introduction to Walter Greenwood, Alan Sillitoe, Arnold Wesker, Willy Russell and Mary Beckett can’t be all bad, though.

There are two problems. One is time. Getting the reading done ought to be doable, after all, I do read quite a lot, I just need to make sure I read the right things rather than whatever takes my fancy. The main problem, time-wise, is lectures. They are all during working hours, which means I have to make up the time (which is doable), but if we are busy or something needs doing yesterday I can’t just disappear for a couple of hours. So I will probably only be able to attend a fraction of the lectures.

The other problem is my fellow students. This course is bachelor level, which means my fellow students are mostly in their early twenties. It also means a lot of them have no idea why they’re taking this course, they are there because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. There will, I assume (or hope), be exceptions.

Hence we come to our “young people nowadays” moment. The first lecture was yesterday. We were supposed to have an introduction to the social history and then to look at two short-stories by D.H. Lawrence – The Odour of Chrysantemums and Fanny and Annie. These two stories we’d been told (via the university’s “community” boards) would be available in a compendium. However, the compendium was only available as of yesterday. First I figured I’d let the students who were actually students rather than just joyriders like me get the chance to check out any Lawrence than the library might have, and that I’d wait for the compendium to arrive. Wednesday, however, when it (the compendium) still hadn’t (arrived), I popped in at the library to check if they might, on the off chance, still have a Lawrence collection. They did, I checked it out and read the two stories Wednesday evening. I did wonder, because as far as I could see the library was only supposed to have one copy of Lawrence’s collected short-stories, and I thought it was a bit odd that it was still available. Then, yesterday in the one hour of lectures I managed to sneak in between the chaos that is work, the lecturer asked if anyone had managed to find the stories anywhere else, seeing as the compendium had been delayed. Two people put their hand up. Me, that’s one. Another girl, that’s two. And the other girl had only managed to find Fanny and Annie. Which is when I thought: “Young people nowadays!” And then realised they were just the same back when I was a bachelor student, I remember being vaguely shocked at how little initiative the average student managed to show back then as well.

Don’t people realise that it’s a good idea to have read the text before hearing a lecture on it?

Don’t people realise there are such a things as libraries?

Apparently not.

Still, what little I managed to catch of the lecture was interesting enough. Unfortunately, I only managed one hour. And since the lecturer is from Bergen, this course is “condenced” with lectures only in weeks 4, 9 and 13 – and long lectures in those weeks. And I didn’t manage to get away today. Which means I missed a grand total of 9 hours this week. Pity. Still, there’s a chance things at work will be slightly less hectic in week 9, so there is hope.

We’ll see.

… to say that voice in my head this morning is, I think, Dean Martin. Singing King of the Road. Except when he gets to the “trailers for sale or rent” part he sings “Sailors for trail or rent” which is very whimsical of him. I find the transposition rather entertaining, though it’s possible the sailors might object. And why the king of the road would sing about such goings on I have no idea. He does, though.

Through bookcrossing I found Heart on my sleeve and the 1001 Things blog.

I bought a book called ‘1001 places to see before you die’ and it struck me that we often have lists of ‘things to do’ but rarely celebrate things we’ve done….so, the lists of things we haven’t done get longer and longer and we forget how lucky we really are.

This is an exceedingly good idea, and one I’d like to copy. However, I need yet another blog like a hole in the head, so I will include the posts towards my 1001 things list in this blog, and simply tag them with the correct category.

Ai, ai. F?rste dag p? jobb etter ferien er alltid en smule vanskelig ? takle. Det hjelper selvsagt ikke at reisef?lget for de siste feriedagene fortsatt er i London (ikke at jeg heller vil v?re i London enn p? jobb, neida, slett ikke). Akk og ve.

For ? underholde meg selv har jeg opprettet en ny nasjon p? Nation States. Jeg hadde en f?r, men den var slettet p? grunn av manglende aktivitet. N? f?r vi se om jeg klarer ? stikke innom ofte nok.

Kanskje jeg skulle pr?ve ? jobbe litt til f?r lunsj…