His son was killed in spiced herring

Christmas was nice. We ate a lot of food and laughed about all the things that happen when you mix Norwegian, Swedish and Danish too often. Like when my Swedish aunt read a Danish newspaper once, where it said: “His son was killed in crossfire in Iraq”. The Danish word for crossfire is krydsild, while she read the Swedish word kryddsild instead, which means spiced herring. Imagine that.

Afterwards we ate homemade sweets and opened presents. My grandmother gave me a moose sausage and my brother is building me a bookshelf because I have all my books in stacks around the room, like this one.

Christmas soon

Yesterday I took the boat home to my parents. The ocean was white in patches, and when I got off it was like Stepping Out In Winter.





Family arrived from Sweden and Denmark yesterday, and we celebrated my grandmother’s birthday. She’s 87 now, and one of the people I admire the most. Sometimes I think there’s more life in her than in me. It’s only a couple of years ago that she cycled twenty minutes to the nearest shop and she’s more updated in the world’s affairs than I am. Not that I'm very updated.

In the quiet

There are certain days when the dreams of the night linger on like a soundtrack or a background, and you mirror all your movements in them.

I can feel the snow outside in my tummy. Nice!

Sleep

I sleep too much these nights. I went from seven hours at night this autumn to eight, and now I need nine. Last weekend I managed eleven.
What a waste of time! I want to do something useful, not sleep. Like writing this art history essay for instance, I really should do that.

Cold

When I got out today the cold stiffened my fingers through my mittens (which I accidentally lost later on) and my breath was visible. It finally felt like December. And I looked around and I saw the houses had crept nearer to each other to keep warm, making the streets smaller, cleaner, it was as if the cold had eroded everything unnecessary away making it look almost sharp, and I had this grand feeling of seeing everything at once, of getting the whole picture.

Am inside with my tea now, I’ve lit some candles and trying rather feebly to write my art history essay in two days. Hah.

Sometimes my feet doesn't hurt at all.

Drawings

This woman was pregnant,

and this one was very thin.

Finger joints

We’re having anatomy at school these days, we’re learning about the bones, muscles and tendons in our arms and hands. That’s so we’ll know how they work and how to draw them. As an anecdote our teacher told us that there aren’t actually any muscles in the fingers, and if one does a neat cut over one of the joints, through the skin and the two tendons, it’s really easy to pick the bone off if we’d like to that one day. Just… pick it off.
It made me look at my fingers differently.

I went to the Gogol Bordello-concert on Saturday, and if we exclude the fact that Benedicte almost got hurt, Anne had to be lifted away from the crowd by a guard and that I found myself in need of biting a man, it was amazing. At some point the world and I was made of the same matter: Sound and movements.

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