Category: Little Voices archive entries

It is! Really! It’s all sunny and mild outside, and I had my coat open and my scarf undone (mind you, I’ll probably get a cold, now, and that would be inconvenient, but who cares in such weather?) and really didn’t want to go sit in the office. I did anyway, though. But now I really do not want to stay any longer so I’ve transferred some files on to my laptop and will (no, really, I will) do some testing at home tomorrow.

Voice in my head: Murmurs “Still wanna know what it’s like to be a butterfly”

Via said forum, a test (in Norwegian), “How much do you know about sex”

My result:

Wow!

Du vet virkelig hva som er hva og hvor, både på din egen kropp og det motsattes kjønn.

Og enda bedre: Du vet nøyaktig hvordan du skal bruke kunnskapen din også!

Vær så snill å ikke skryt altfor mye av dette resultatet, det er så flaut for oss andre…

Which is really quite funny.

Well, that was fun.

I’ve just been to Rød Tomat with a whole bunch of people from this internet forum I occasionally frequent (and no, I’m not telling you where it is). One of them, a girl who tends to be broke a lot, had had money from her mother – due to said mother, apparently, being relieved that she was meeting some actual people for a change. I asked whether the fact that she knew all these actual people from the internet had been omitted from the explanation. It had…

Ooo, off to listen to “Liten og grø;nn”, I was early, so naturally I did end up stopping by Platekompaniet.

Voice in my head: Øystein Sunde, still, but now singing “Hvis dine ører henger ned” for some obscure reason

Let down by Kazaa.

I’ve got an old favourite running in my head, Øystein Sunde’s “Liten og grønn”, and I want to listen to it. Now, somewhere I have “Sunde på boks”, which is a best of collection from before CDs were even invented (or at least before they were something anyone had actually heard about, let alone seen), it’s three cassettes in a box, which makes it an awkward shape to store with other cassettes which is why it isn’t and I have no idea where to find it. I know I saw it somewhere recently, but where? It used to be one of my most highly prized possessions, actually, I can remember being thrilled when I got it as a Christmas present. Does that mean I ought to have taken better care of it? Probably. I mean, it’s in my flat somewhere, and in good condition too, I just have absolutely no idea where.

In the meantime, I thought that Kazaa might solve my problem in so far as let me hear the song. But, no. And it’s frustrating.

The problem, you see, is that this is one of those songs where I know most of the lyrics, but I can never remember how it begins and I am not 100% sure of the order…

Minus the first line(s?) it starts:

Og har kroppen stappa full av folk og fe.
Her er posten som skal fram,
og aviser likedan,
og en livredd visesanger på turné.

Morn, morn, Sandnessjøen, her er jeg!
Grønn og liten, sjøsjuk, men fornøyd.
Jeg er en Twin-åtter på vei fra Mo i Rana,
og har hundre mil igjen, før jeg blir fortøyd.

And then we definitely have:

De’kke lett å være grønn når man er liten,
men det er verre å være bleik når man er stor,
folk skal jo reise så fordømrande fort, nå for tiden
og NSB står fast i gamle spor.

Mange mener at jeg er for gammel,
en trofast tjeners tid er snart forbi,
degradert til håpløst gammelt skrammel,
en tegnebrett-fossil til evig tid.

Men når det stormer fra sydvest,
da liker jeg meg best,
jeg bryter håndbak med Odin og Tor.
Så når SAS ikke vil,
og når Braathen ikke tør,
kommer jeg dansende rundt torghatten som før.

But in which order? And I’m sure I’m missing something, too. The last refrain, however, is quite positively:

Morn, morn, Sandnessjøen, her er jeg!
Bli med opp en tur, skal du få se
på en Twin-åtter på vei fra Mo i Rana
som har to-tre år igjen,
før’n er passé.

Which all means I might have to drop by Platekompaniet on my way home and buy the record. Or go home and dig through the whole flat until I find the box.

Voice in my head: (obviously) Øystein Sunde (I wish he’d sing the bits I can’t remember too, I’m sure he knows them well enough)

Friday! (Now, if I only didn’t have to work this weekend…)

1. Do you like talking on the phone? Why or why not?
It depends. I like talking on the phone to people I know, and know well. For me to actually pick up the phone voluntarily and call, however, I don’t only need to know the person I’m going to talk to, I also need to know who else might be liable to answer it… A bit of phone-phobia, yes.

2. Who is the last person you talked to on the phone?
One of the IT-people at FLO/IKT.

3. About how many telephones do you have at home?
About? I have one “stationary” which is connected to the phone net, one which isn’t, my mobile (the working one) and, uhm, two working but account-less mobiles.

4. Have you encountered anyone who has really bad phone manners? What happened?
Uhm, not really. Well, my mother usually does solitaire on the computer while talking to me, which isn’t the best manners ever, but only noticeable when she does something stupid and says “oh no” a propos of nothing…

5. Would you rather pick up the phone and call someone or write them an e-mail or a letter? Why or why not?
Going by the majority, write an e-mail or letter. The only people I can think of at the moment who I actually phone voluntarily are my family, Janne, LindaW and LindaS, Tone and uhm, Andreas, I guess.

Is what I’m doing at the moment, and I apologise. I apologise to you (as in You, Him with a capital H, the possibly-but-I-really-have-no-idea-man-of-my-dreams), it must be very confusing. And I apologise to the rest of you (my constant and occasional readers), this must be getting pretty monotonous.

So I am apologising. I am also asking for forbearance, as the aforementioned shilly-shallying is likely to go on for some time, I seem powerless to stop it.

Take this week. For at least two days I was convinced I had cracked it. I wanted friendship, nothing more. Yesterday, however, the sort of mood I was in made it excessively likely that had He (you) come over and said “How about it, then?” I would very probably have said “Oh, yes, please” and we could have walked happily off into the sunset. It may have had something to do with mental exhaustion from various other things going on, especially work (work, work and work), and I might have regretted my rashness seconds later. We’ll never know. And today? Well, today I’m back to “Well, I don’t know, maybe not”. I have no idea what sort of signals I am sending anymore. Tolerably confused and confusing ones, I suspect. For this I apologise also.

And I’m still at work. I have masses more to do. All I really want to do is go home and sleep for a week, though, and I think there is a merit to knowing when to call it a day and go home. Cleaning up code that has been done in a state of befuddled exhaustion is liable to take a lot longer than actually writing the code afresh in the morning.

Voice in my head: Vonda Shepard repeatedly insisting “Why would I subject myself to this kind of disaster?”

Chilling newscast this morning. The British and US representatives in the UN apparently had something of a major disagreement. Not good.

The US ambassador to Norway is not happy either. Not good either. On the other hand, he seems to have missed out on a lot of history classes. Apparently he has held a speech or similar saying that the US are disappointed in Norway’s attitude to the war on Saddam. The US, he says, have always come to Norway’s support, and think that maybe they could, reasonably, expect some support in return when their own security is threatened. ‘Scuse, me, but when, excactly, have we had help from the US when our security has been at risk? During the napoleonic wars, Norway, being under Denmark, suffered from the British naval dominance in that imports were largely cut off and a lot of people starved. Granted, the US was, for a time, at war with Britain and allied with France, but I don’t think we saw much benefit, to be honest. At other times, the US was neutral or even in half-alliance with Britain, which certainly did us no good. WW2 (see, Norway hasn’t been involved in all that many wars lately), yeah, so, ok, you chipped in. It took you a couple of years to do so, however, and I seem to remember something about a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour being the deciding factor in bringing you into the conflict. That was December 1941. We’d then been under occupation since April the year before.

What else, oh yes, the Marshall Plan. Well, we’re very grateful. I fail to see that it has much bearing on the current issue, however.

And don’t even try to tell me that the main point of NATO, from the US point of view, was, for many years, anything but preventing the Soviet Union from getting any bases nearer US territory than they already had.

I’m sorry. We’re just not buying it.

From the quite excellent mailing list/webpage Word Spy, a word for my perpetual condition:

earworm (EER.wurm) n.

A song or tune that repeats over and over inside a person’s head.
Also: ear-worm, ear worm.

Example Citation
———————————
“I couldn’t get the song out of my head. It’s like a broken
record,” Clark said Thursday while shopping at the Galleria at
Tyler mall in Riverside. “I keep humming it, and you know, I
don’t even like Prince’s music.”

Her experience reflects a phenomenon shared by the vast majority
of people, according to an ongoing study at the University of
Cincinnati. Nearly everybody has been mentally tortured at one
point in their lives by an “earworm” — a tune that keeps
repeating itself over and over in their heads.

The research also indicates that people who get the most
earworms tend to listen to music frequently and have neurotic
habits, such as biting pencils or tapping fingers.
–Hieu Tran Phan, “‘Sticky tune’ hits a chord with many,” The
Press-Enterprise, March 4, 2003

Backgrounder
———————————
The term “earworm” is the literal English translation of the German
word “ohrwurm” (see the earliest citation, below, for more). An
earworm is also sometimes called a “sticky tune.”

Earliest Citation
———————————
If a meme is a cluster of semantic symbols that propagates through a
human population in a social manner — similar to the way a gene is a
combination of biochemical symbols that propagates through a human
population in a genetic manner — a sudden, wildly popular, new
addition to “the hit parade’ can be seen as a kind of meme When the
medium of radio and the recording industry that grew up alongside it
created a system for propagating musical themes through a population,
a new phenomenon became possible — the “overnight hit.” The idea of
a “hit” isn’t untranslatable, since most cultures have a word for the
winner of a competition. But the idea of a tune, a melody, a
combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody’s lips at
the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a
respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space
in peoples minds until they finally succeed inforgetting it, merits a
word of its own.

The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with “door worm,” where the
“w” is pronounced like a “v”) to denote these cognitively infectious
musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can’t
keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he
can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the
original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli
parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means
“ear worm” and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl
into the ear.
–Howard Rheingold, “Untranslatable words,” The Whole Earth Review,
December 22, 1987

Oh joy! A diagnosis!

Voice in my head (or earworm if you like): Ole Paus – Blues for Pyttsann Jespersens pårørende

I feel like quoting Joan Armatrading (Voice in my head: “So why don’t you?”), more specifically, the start of a song that was used in a pretty daft film a few years ago: “I’m not in love, but I’m open to persuasion.” According to her official website, it’s her best-known line. Well, it’s the only one I know, so that doesn’t surprise me.

Anyway, I’m sure there was I point I was trying to make before I got sidetracked. Ah, yes: I’m sick of persuading myself that it would be very convenient to feel this, that or the other. I wish, for once, someone else would do the persuading. Or do I?

Voice in my ear: Melissa Etheridge – the record simply named Melissa Etheridge, very good music for when you feel a lot, or want to feel a lot.

My apologies for having gotten you all excited (to those of you that were). I doubt there’s anything more than friendship in it, after all. I seem to have come to my senses somewhat before getting myself into a “what the hell was I thinking” situation for a change. Not that new friends aren’t a source of excitement, because they are. But, you know, don’t wait for the invitations for my wedding just yet.

Just as well, really. What with my schedule (exhibit A: I was at work from 8 am to 8 pm today) at the moment, the last thing I need is a boyfriend. Yes, ok, so it would be kinda nice to have one at my beck and call, one I could phone up when I felt like it (“Hi, come over please, I need a hug.” or “I’d quite like company for dinner today. Oh, you’ll cook? Great!”), but wouldn’t expect anything in return, but that’s a bit one-sided and hardly the sort of relationship I’m looking for.

Which is another proof that I’m not as interested as I wish I were. Surely, if I were falling in love, thoughts like “Oh, lord, he’d expect me to spend time with him” would not occur to me?

Or am I so worried about talking myself into something I don’t really feel (something I am very good at) that I am now talking myself out of something I do really feel?

I dunno. Time will tell.

On a lighter note: My neighbour’s rather dishy.

Voice in my head: Prefab Sprout – Cruel