Always Trust the Eyebrows

Imagine a world...

There is nothing so utterly disheartening as being elbow-deep in grading a stack of severely repetitive papers about early American literature and suddenly realizing that the exact sentence you are reading floated before your eyes yesterday. I riffled back through and sure enough, found a paper with a sentence that curiously matched the one I was reading. The question is, did they cheat? Together, or separately and were unlucky enough to lift the same sentence? Or did they just both take it from the same source and didn’t know how to document it? Still, that was nothing to the paper I looked through an hour later, with English so impeccably store-bought that I read through only the first half a page before wandering distractedly down the halls of the English offices in quest of a prof to take the dirty document off my hands. I’d always wondered how instructors know that someone is cheating. Now I realize that their eyebrows tell them; mine lifted into a quizzical frown before my brain clicked. Always trust the eyebrows.

My high school students are such a delight. They're smart, they're funny, they're earnest, and their looking up to me as some kind of teacher-god doesn't make me uncomfortable as it does with my college students and adult students. And I'm free to up the ante on them, to raise expectations so they deliver more, while my college students are stuck in a rut of poor expectations and poor skills that seem mutually enforced, and I can't do anything about it because there's three profs and a grad student standing between me and pedagogic reform. 

Today we got into a discussion on norms in Norwegian classes; whether it’s anathema to raise your hand often in class. There’s a Norwegian cultural standard called the “Jante Law,” which is the social taboo against pushing yourself forward, and my students joked about it really being the “jente law” –“the girl law” – because it applies more to women than men. Some things never change.

 I learned in class today that native English-speakers are a minority in the English-speaking population of the world. Scary, right? That means English is more often spoken in pidgin than authentic twang. In some ways, it makes my position as a native-speaker more tenuous, less important; if most of the world speaks English with various garbled add-ins from their native language, then perhaps that is authentic English, and my clean Midwestern accent an aberration.

One of my Norwegian friends waxed poetic on me while drunk. He asked me for my favorite quote, and I gave him Tennyson’s “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” But his sudden interest in literature was all a ploy; when I asked him for his favorite quote in return, he said something about true love being complete surrender, and moved his chair closer to mine. Unfortunately, I’m a lit major, and rather well-armed for this sort of thing. “Yes,” I breathed into his ear, “and do you know what Plato says?” He inclined his head eagerly. “That love is a serious mental disease.” Then we talked about rainproof backpack covers for a while.

My Life is Average

“Okay, let’s talk about bibliographies,” I told my writing workshop at UiB. “Are you guys used to MLA, or do you use something else?”

Mostly nods, some blank stares.
One guy raised his hand.

“Are you talking about My Life is Average?”

Facepalm.

Finally, Saturday night,  I began to regret my college sobriety. Oh, I drank a bit in college –the occasional classy glass of wine with a friend (Shoshi I miss you!), or half a cup of beer at a friend’s birthday, and of course that one time when Ellen borrowed OJ from our RA to celebrate after I’d defended my thesis, but for the most part I watched as my friends got drunk and toasted me. Yet Saturday night, as I nursed a bloody finger, I thought I’d have done better to have drank a little more and mocked a little less.

Connection between bloody fingers and beer? Well, after a few weeks of using orange juice for Kiddush, I’ve decided to branch out. I went for cider last week, but this week, having consumed considerably more beer in the past month than I’m used to (three whole glasses) and begun to like the taste, I decided to try beer. Probably even the hardiest drinker from the States would have also forgotten about Norway’s puritanical alcohol laws and attempted to buy their six-pack after 8. I returned for a morning alcohol purchase. Digressive question: does this lead to morning drunkenness among Norwegians? Anyhow, I bought my beers, but used the last of my cider for kiddush. Then, Saturday evening, after chilling at a friend’s apartment where everyone was pre-partying before a rave at the Bunker (also called the Cave, the local party spot in the forest seems to have many names), I came back to try a beer for havdalah. And realized I don’t possess a bottle opener.

Now, everywhere I go, I go fully equipped; with my swiss army knife I feel like a boy scout. But I checked, and it doesn’t have a beer opener. Maybe they figured boy scouts don’t need them. Anyhow, I remembered once seeing an enterprising friend open a beer with a piece of paper folded many times, and decided to try it. Which ended with my middle finger bleeding and bandaged (after all, I am prepared for all normal emergencies). I finally opened the beer, cleverly utilizing a wine opener to pry the lid off. And scared my sister on skype, when she saw me chugging the last of the bottle. Well.

I met the board of the Bergen Jewish community. They’re all Israeli, all working people who shake hands heavily and sound so… Israeli. The rabbi, Joav, flew in from Oslo to speak about the start of cheider. He advertised for a seminar in Oslo for their kids to come to, and interestingly, their first question was about security. And, also interestingly, he had a really good answer: nobody knows exactly when or where the seminar is except the people running it—the kids are taken out of Oslo to somewhere nearby for the weekend, with security. Wow. After having received such friendly responses from the people here who are slowly figuring out that I’m Jewish, it shocked me to remember that the number one concern for Jewish parents in Europe has to be their kids’ safety. 

The Bergen weather forecast site has a caution symbol on it for tomorrow, with something that seems to translate into “really heavy rain.” As Bergen always has really heavy rain, I’m not sure what to expect, but I’ve started to build an ark. And my neighbor wants me to get it out of his driveway.  

So far, September has held true to its promise

September has come, it is hers

Whose vitality leaps in the autumn

Whose nature prefers

Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace...