The Susanne

Movie night with the sister –  what a lovely concept. And what a lovely night. A while back we placed an ad at finn.no which serves as a kind of ebay to us living in stone age Norway, asking if anyone owned (and would be will­ing to sell us) a copy of the movie Vill­hesten (The Wild Horse) from 1994. I’d write all about it but I’m simply too lazy so if you want you can read about it (in Nor­we­gian) on Nor­we­gian wiki­pe­dia here. Grow­ing up as a horse crazy little girl it was one of my favour­ite films and I even belonged to a book club called Pennyklub­ben which was all about horses, and they had sponsored the film and sent all their mem­bers the single with the theme song from the movie: Du Følger Vinden (You follow the wind). Yeah, you guessed cor­rectly: I played it non-​stop.

So a lovely girl replied to the ad and my sister bought the film and tonight we were finally able to sit down and watch the movie we’d so been long­ing to revisit. And oh what a won­der­ful film it is. It had me back in 1994 in an instant. I felt the old long­ing for my own horse, long­ing for an adven­ture like the girls in the film, long­ing to listen to the song again… and again and again! Alas — the single is long lost. I ask myself how I could have lost such a treas­ured object, but the truth is I got over my horse crazy stage at some point and prob­ably threw it out during one of my tan­trums which usu­ally occurred when I was forced to tidy my room, or maybe it was even lost long before that time. I’m ser­i­ously con­tem­plat­ing pla­cing another ad just for that little cd single. With just one or pos­sibly two tracks on it — but then I only need that one, that song that can still make me feel like a ten year old girl whose greatest ambi­tion is to own my own horse and go for long rides every day. Ah…

But my life is quite changed since then. My ambi­tions now are much higher and the pro­spect of them much scar­ier. I’ve still not com­pleted all my oblig­at­ory course work for the semester, my mind just refuses to co-​operate, every time I sit down to work my mind blanks or freezes or I get a head ache from the stress of it all. I wish I knew how to calm myself, col­lect my thoughts and just do it but I don’t — I con­tinue to doubt my own abil­ity to the point where the self doubt becomes a self-​fulfilling proph­ecy and the end result is… well I don’t know the end result yet but the situ­ation at the moment is far from great!

But I still treat myself. The other day I decided to buy myself a cook’s knife which I’ve been want­ing for a long time, a san­toku knife but I don’t think it’s an actual san­toku. The little leaf­let that came with it says it’s a san­toku but I’m sure that’s just a descript­ive term and it’s really a fake. It’s def­in­itely lovely though. So light, fits so well in my hand and does my every bid­ding with no trouble at all and I’m simply smit­ten with it.

I also allowed myself a little night out on Friday after spend­ing many hours read­ing and taking notes for my essay on Vol­pone (yes, still on that! Will it ever end I ask you! But then I know it will, for the final dead­line is on Sat­urday). I had made plans with Lis­beth to go out but then I texted her saying I had to stay home and study because I simply didn’t deserve to go out. — And then I changed my mind of course and allowed myself some fun. And oh, we had fun. We had moji­tos at qba, a bar at Grünerløkka where Hilde works, and the Aus­tralian boy who danced whilst making our drinks man­aged to get grass straws in our drinks. They still tasted fine though.

And we met a lovely dog who tried to eat our faces and my camera. His owner came out and I apo­lo­gised to her for get­ting him all excited but I don’t quite remem­ber her reac­tion. I sus­pect she was stone sober and found me annoy​ing.The dog loved us though! (and yeah, I’m a cat person not a dog person. And I still liked this dog)

Tomor­row is my last chance to finish my phon­et­ics paper then have to really get down to Vol­pone: I’m making myself hit the lib­rary so hope­fully that will give me that extra push. Also it will keep me away from the kit­chen which is always a big help, today I made a quick couscous soup which I read about and it just soun­ded so lovely. I used some minced beef because it was on spe­cial and some tomato paste and it was amaz­ing! Mmmm. Although I think I put a little too much couscous in there - I’ll use less next time. No photo - it simply didn’t look as good as I would have liked. It tasted deli­cious though and really, that’s what mat­ters isn’t it?