Living in misery – all for the love of a cat
June 14, 2008
What I will not do for my kitty..
Due to a million things, I now live – temporarily – in a smelly basement in the most boring town in Norway. I assure you, there’s stiff competition. A filthy kitchen upstairs, where cat is not welcome. The first thing I had to do was to scrub the stove. I am not hysterically antiseptic or dainty, but there seemed to be things living there. So, for the smelly basement – the smell sends me back to ireland; a mouldy, damp cat-pee infested mess of old sofas and wrecked furniture. Naked lightbulbs. Concrete floor. Mouldy carpet. Nice…
All because of a general aversion to cats, lack of information and communication.
I could kill to get out of here. I am pissed off. Too pissed off to take a photo of the dungheap.
I have been here less than three nights, and I grow more miserable by the minute.
And to top it off, the wireless connection is atrocious.
I alternately hate and love my cat – I live here for lack of options because I refuse to get rid of her. Clearly love won.
Bollocks.
Land of war, land of peace
June 9, 2008
A double standard is twice as good as one.
Norway is the seventh largest exporter of weapons. But we don’t like to talk about it. The image of being a peaceful nation, if not THE peaceful nation, would be a little marred by that fact. It’s a lot more fun having the image of peace-builder. We send men in suits around the world openly and secretly, to promote peace and All That Is Good. Naively, but with good intentions, we poke our noses into any ‘clean’ conflict (i.e. any that our closest allies are not involved in. Guess who). You get up on a high horse, there might be a long way down.
We roll around in oil and fish – you’d think that’ll do – but no. Our own army is being downgraded in one end (manpower) and upgraded in the other (fighter jets).
And we export. I like the argument of right and wrong in this – “we only export to the good guys”. Oh, right! Then that’s all right, then! Good bullets and bad bullets.
The world is a complicated place. But idiotic justifications is insulting us all.
