The Susanne

Yes­ter­day, I made my first loaf of bread! Well, let me reph­rase that: I made my first loaf of bread without a recipe and that did not come ready-​mixed. And it is deli­cious! It came out of the oven with a lovely, golden crust and the deli­cious smell eman­at­ing from my little wonder lingered in the flat for hours after­wards. I used a mix of all the dif­fer­ent kinds of flour I had in my pantry, a little of this a little of that, and I have to say the gamble paid off. I baked it on very high heat for the first five minutes and then lowered the heat for the next 45 minutes, a tech­nique I’ll def­in­itely stick to. The only prob­lem now is the fact that I really don’t like bread that much and it usu­ally takes me two weeks to finish just one loaf. Mean­ing my bread has to be stored in the fridge and it still very nearly goes off before I can finish it. In fact I usu­ally have to throw out the last few slices. So what do I do now? There is no way this bread is going in the fridge! It is simply too beau­ti­ful! I sup­pose throw­ing it out when it goes off is no great crime. Or I could give it to the poor, and then we’ll see how poor they really are!

In the last 8 days I’ve been to the theatre twice: on the night before my week long ‘home exam’ and then tonight, after my lec­ture which marked the end of the exam. And I must say, there really is some­thing poetic about the rela­tion­ship between the two plays and my exam: The first play we went to see was A Mid­sum­mer night’s dream. At the National Theatre, no less. Oh yeah, and with pretty much an all-​star cast includ­ing some of Norway’s greatest stage actors. Recipe for suc­cess, no? NO! It was simply pain­ful to watch. It was a failed attempt at mod­ern­ising a beau­ti­ful clas­sic. In the pro­gram they ‘justified’ their adapt­a­tion by claim­ing that theatre does not belong in a museum, and there­fore theatre must evolve and adapt to modern times. Well here’s what I have to say to that: There’s a reason why clas­sics are clas­sics! And that reason has noth­ing to do with taking a great piece of drama and turn­ing it into some­thing cheap, actu­ally plain awk­ward. Talk about fail­ure. I felt cheated.

Then came my week of tor­ment and recluse. I was plan­ning to spend it at the lib­rary but the day after I was given the theme for my lec­ture I woke up with a massive cold which kept me firmly in its fever­ish grasp until only two days ago. I man­aged to get through it though and my lec­ture this morn­ing went amaz­ingly well! (Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I wrote the whole thing from begin­ning to end, includ­ing build­ing all my argu­ments and reach­ing all my con­clu­sions, yesterday!)

That lec­ture really was a turn­ing point: tonight was an amaz­ing exper­i­ence. I didn’t know much about Die Fle­der­maus (The Bat) going into it, all I knew was what I’d read very quickly on the descrip­tion page on the National Theatre’s web page when I bought the tick­ets two weeks ago. I was a little wor­ried we’d have a repeat of last week’s fiasco. But this was…fantastic! From the moment the lights dimmed I knew we were in for some­thing spe­cial. This too had been adap­ted, mod­ern­ised, given con­tem­por­ary ref­er­ences. But this time they’d gotten the ref­er­ences right! They were funny! I laughed more than I have in a long time and I left the theatre feel­ing an intense yet light kind of hap­pi­ness that I can’t com­pare to any­thing. I highly recom­mend catch­ing this if you’re able: but only if you speak Nor­we­gian. I don’t think the per­form­ance would be quite as good without the dia­logue and most of all the references.

So there you have it: the theatre exper­i­ence going into my exam was a gigantic dis­ap­point­ment. The week of pre­par­ing my lec­ture/ drift­ing in and out of deli­ri­ous fever sleep was awful but worth it and I came out this end with a lec­ture that I per­formed quite well if I may say so myself. And then, having gone through these two great trials and sur­vived, I am rewar­ded with a night such as this.

It really doesn’t get much better.

Except that I’m done and I get to take my Pentax out to play! Hooray! It’s Today!

Ps, here’s a little some­thing for you…

I couldn’t help myself. I love my Pentax. And I love my books!

I got the Pentax! Yay!
Now all I have to do is prac­tice great self restraint until Wed­nes­day when I have my lec­ture. HA!

My mate who works in a photo store offered to give me advice on cam­eras should I decide to replace my old one (of course I did). So I asked him and now I’m very con­flic­ted! Should I go for the ’safe’ option of the Canon I’ve been eyeing or should I go with the Pentax at two thirds of the price but two mega­pixels less? Accord­ing to him the Pentax does a more real­istic colour repro­duc­tion and comes with a slightly better lens. I’ve also read that it is dust- and weather­proof which is import­ant, isn’t it? It has a slightly smal­ler LCD, but does that even matter? And, it’s smal­ler and has a better grip (but he did advice me to try hold­ing them both because this of course is very subjective).

I am con­flic­ted. I finally have the money to buy a camera and now all I can think is ‘What if I buy the wrong one?’

I don’t want to end up with buyer’s remorse, not on some­thing as big as this.