Free!

My home - the silo
My home – the silo

“Finally Free,” I thought this morning upon waking up. Although I had predicted the passing away of summer since about mid august on this blog, it was a much freer Johannes that woke up this morning and realized that fall had finally invaded Oslo. Or lets call it autumn, and lets say “arrived” and not “invaded.” Cause this is a happy event. Yesterday two things happened: we had the release party of the social anthropological yearbook (which I have been using most of July through September to set, have been co-editor and written an article in).

Johannes Wilm - a free man
Johannes Wilm – a free man

The other thing was not quite so funny, as yesterday was the end of an era. I dropped out of the coordinating group of Attac Blindern. I had been sitting there since last December, and I felt that I had been doing an overly large proportion of the work connected to it. And also, we really didn’t manage to get new people active within Attac. We were only a handfull of activists a few years back (2001), that together started Attac at the univeristy – even before it was started nationally. But then the bureaucrates started moving in. While most of my former co-activists have left Attac a long time ago and have been denouncing it as a career-building project for single individuals, I tried to cross some fo the divide, after returning from Douglas, AZ and the experience of a place with no anti-capitalist left to speak of at all.
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doing the “confused professor”

Ha! Finally I got my neighboor to speak again – at least a few sentences. The occasion this time was that I had forgotten a frozen pizza outside of our door in the hall way. “Is this yours?,” she asked – thereby breaking several weeks of silence. “Ehm… yes” – I had actually been looking for it for several minutes. She gave me the “you are freaking weird”-look while handing me the pizza. But of course that was not all cause the next thing was that she was about to enter the bathroom: “If you need to shower, just remove those,” I said while pointing at the five wet pink all-body suits that were hanging in the shower. Apparently that was no weirder than leaving a frozen pizza in the hall way, so she just said: “In fact, I do have to shower.” And after another few words exchanges she moved into the shower, putting away those pink suits.

Johannes Wilm on his knees
Johannes Wilm on his knees

 

Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?

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My grandma rides her bike no more

I crashed my bike last night while riding around inner Oslo on my way home from the university. Or rather, I couldn’t handle it for a few split seconds after shifting gears as somehow the chain got loose. I managed to get home and scared one person that I had chosen to tell about it over mobile messaging, just in case I had some more severe commotio cerebri that would make it impossible for me to communicate this morning in which case the person could call the ambulance the net day. Of course nothing happened,and so I’m sitting here with nothing left but a right foot with a few scrapes which renders me sick enough not to make plans to leave this room too much for the next day or so.

Grossmutti & me in Rostock, January 2004
Grossmutti & me in Rostock, January 2004

It is much worse with my grandmother. My grandmother has been living on her bike. And now she won’t be able to ride it any more. My grandmother without a bike? Not something I can think of. But she likes to ride trains too – usually along that route that she fled along on her bike during the end of WWII.
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