As I came back from Berlin today (have been there again this weekend, but more about that in the next post), i had to stay at university all day to stay for various obligatory affairs. And when I finally came home tonight (about 15 min. ago), I had a new neighbor! I figured it out when I opened the outer door and saw that someone had put a water cooker and a candle inside a bowl of mine on the shelf inside the kitchen. “Oh, crap!” I thought, “I’m pretty sure I hadn’t cleaned the kitchen sufficiently when I realized hat I had way less time than calculated to run to the airport express train Thursday night.”

Continue reading A new neighbor meets my food! →

I got a few requests as to update everyone on the state of relation to my neighbor. Well, she is gone. In fact she left some time early in December or so, and instead a guy moved in. She finally got her own room in this very same student house. The guy who moved in after here was from Oslo West. He let me know that right away. “I’ve always lived in this town — just somewhat further West”. Gee — as if I couldn’t smell that. He was 21 and had “just moved out from his parents” as they were moving from the family house he had grown up in to a smaller flat which he helped them to fix during December. That’s why he almost wasn’t here at all. Starting around New Years he was to move back to Oslo West to live with some of his childhood friends. So right now, I’m having the kitchen all to myself again.
An interesting fact about my neighboor for all of last fall is though that according to her sccesor, a bunch of things from the police arrived for her after she had moved. Now students living in these flats do not tend to receive a whole lot of parking tickets, but I guess with alllikelihood she probably was no master spy or terrorist or anything like that.

Now you could probably hear some of the disgust that I had for my very last neighbor — and of course that is connected with soem normative standards that exist in my mind:

– you have to move out before you turn 18
– you should not attend university or live in the same country that you grew up in

Now of course I realize that only a veyr small percentage of the world population lives according to these standards, and so it could probably make for an interesting study of how exactly I got those standards (family-related, I can tell you), and also who I would let parse without following them (anyone poor and/or oppressed) and who I would not (well, anyone with relatively rich parents). And again one should ask the question: to what degree is that just a reflection of an internatization of the neo-liberal spirit of the 1980s? How can I have normative standards for flexibilization, when at the same time I attack such demnds on the political level?

has been real nice to me lately. About two weeks ago I send her a two page letter. Or rather I left it on the kitchen counter after cleaning both bathroom and kitchen real throroughly (thought I had wirtten about that). I basically said that I feel we have a weird relationship as we don’t ever talk and then I explained how I had been cornering my previous neighbors and how it was so much easier cause they usually either were guys or had boy friends that I could corner. But neither applies to her, and that’s why it’s so hard to get into contact with her without it looking weird or as if I was up to something completely different.

I put the letter there in the eveing, and it was gone in the morning. Since then she has been really ok. Like today she was making food and all my crap was still floating all over the kitchen. And she didn’t say a thing! Well, she wouldn’t have before either, but she would have made it clear by the way she would look at me and move around the room that she would be really irritated.

However, we still don’t really talk. But when she says “hey” she has started to drag the word out – like “heeyyyyy!”. Before, she’d only give a sharp “hi,” and only when talked to. Now one can actually hear what kind of mood she is in, or at least i think I can hear it.

Also I think she seems to be totally up for talking even more – if only I would start. But I used parts of the letter sayng that I wouldn’t pressure her into talking, and so I’m not going to do tat. Although it’s such a petty! I just hope she gets exchanged with some male foreigner pretty soon.

And even now, although we don’t talk, when I hear her moving around the kitchen I feel comfort in the thought that she would be there if anything were to happen to my right now. All I’d have to do is scream real loud, and she’d feelobliged to check on me. I am not alone, and therefore I am 🙂

ok, so this is my neighboor:
– a student (doo, it’s a student house)
– brown hair
– studies media science
– had a number of social gatherings in her room earlier this summer
– likes to stay in her room forever
– watches downloaded sitcoms on her laptop
– very clean, but tends to forget to remvoe her hair after showering
– owns a set of knives and a microwave
– knows how to use a wok

… and then she has been living there since June or so (at least two months now) and I know not much else…
Continue reading my neighboor is incomprehensible →