The Susanne

My summer job star­ted yes­ter­day. I work at the local lib­rary and so far it is simply amaz­ing, the best job I’ve ever had. My co-​workers are great and very good at taking coffee breaks. I pretty much had the shakes all last night. Bril­liant! The spring semester is over and done with and I got some pretty remark­able exam res­ults, so I’m happy with that. Have ordered pretty much all of the autumn’s cur­riculum already and one of the books arrived yes­ter­day. The Bed­ford Com­pan­ion to Shakespeare.

Can’t wait to read it. Shakespeare is the course I’m look­ing for­ward to the most. I’ve already bought tick­ets to see The Merry Wives of Wind­sor at the Globe when Maria and I go on our adven­ture to London in August and I’m very excited! So in pre­par­a­tion I’m plan­ning to read this whole book, cover to cover. I’m think­ing it will offi­cially make me a Shakespeare-​nerd. But who cares, the book looks great and it’s on my cur­riculum for next semester. So I reckon I’ll accom­plish two things by read­ing it now: one, I’ll be much, much better pre­pared for the Shakespeare course than I’ve ever been for any­thing in my life, and two, I’ll be in a pos­i­tion to bore Maria with a never-​ending supply of Shakepearian tid­bits and geeky facts. Yey me.

Ran into an old friend today also, well she came to the lib­rary. We were close at school then lost con­tact the last year of high school — around the time I broke up with my boy­friend and she star­ted going out with him. No anim­os­ity, it was just that she was in the same group of friends as he whereas I was not. Espe­cially after I broke up with him, as his friends were obliged to hate me. Obvi­ously. It’s a matter of loy­alty. So this girl and I had coffee, well I had coffee, she doesn’t drink poison. But it was cool talk­ing again after all these years. Shar­ing uni anec­dotes and boy­friend stor­ies. Yeah she’s still with the same guy. One woman’s trash is another woman’s treas­ure, isn’t that what they say?

So yeah, the job is work­ing out great, I’m having loads of fun and even more coffee. Home life is… chal­len­ging. Going back to living with your par­ents after having lived on your own is incred­ibly hard. I sup­pose it must get harder with time because I don’t remem­ber it being this dif­fi­cult last year — but maybe that was just because I worked more and was always just exhausted and didn’t have the energy to notice my par­ents at all. I miss cook­ing a lot. I miss decid­ing what to make, i miss shop­ping for food, I miss making things I want and the way I want them. Now it’s more like this:

parent: ’Susanne, do you want to help with dinner?’

me: ‘Ok. I’d love to make some sauce.’

parent: ‘No, I don’t think we’re going to have sauce today. I’m going to make this, and that, and the other, and that’s it.’

me: ‘…’

I don’t blame them. But it’s hard dammit! The bunny, on the other hand, is still thriv­ing. He jumped onto my lap the other night, I couldn’t believe it. Appar­ently that’s a rare level of tame­ness in a bunny.

Last week­end was a pretty cul­tural one by my stand­ards. A blues fest­ival on Sat­urday and the opera on Sunday. The band we went to see is called The Black­birds and my mum’s friend’s rock­star son is in it. They’re really good! Both tech­nic­ally and cre­at­ively, I simply love some of their songs. Also the scene of the fest­ival was so beau­ti­ful, right on the water at Nesod­dtan­gen in the Oslo Fjord, the even­ing sun warm­ing the audi­ence and the sea breeze from the fjord bring­ing good cheer and stir­ring our appet­ites for music. Just lovely.

Our outing on Sunday was to see another of mum’s friends who is a ballet teacher at the Opera School of Ballet. There was a stu­dent show­case and she had choreographed the first part. The whole thing was beau­ti­ful but mum’s friend’s was the best by far. A little because we know her, more because it was the young­est stu­dents, but mostly because it was a beau­ti­ful per­form­ance, it had a clear story and beau­ti­ful music and the kids were really really good and looked like they all had fun. The second half was for the older stu­dents and there were some pretty ridicu­lous acts going on, espe­cially one very ‘modern’ one fea­tur­ing just one girl doing jerky, restricted movements to awful ‘music’ (if you can call it that). A couple of acts were great though, and all in all I thought it was bril­liant. The stu­dents were all so good, and the cho­reo­graphy was, for the most part, lovely. And I heard sev­eral remarks that it was the best thing to show in the new Opera house since it opened. Appar­ently a pretty dis­ap­point­ing ballet had been on last week — this how­ever, was as far from dis­ap­point­ing as it is pos­sible to get.

Well — the lib­rary closes in 15 minutes. This has taken me all day to write, in between work and coffee. I’m off, ta ta!

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