Emotional Investment Planning

I'm guessing this is all quite obvious to everyone else, but according to a friend my attitude is often that of a 12 year old so it takes me longer to figure stuff out.

For many years in Mexico one of the complains I most often heard about me was that in social contexts, especially new ones I seemed tense, quiet, distant and perhaps even slightly angry. I worked hard to get rid of this trait, psychologically pumping myself up in order to be a carefree and open with new people I met who really didn't mean anything to me. It took practice to be friendly with people I had no emotional investment in, but during the last 2 years I got to be pretty Latin about the whole thing. Sometimes I'd go a little over the limit, asking people uncomfortable and personal questions before even knowing their name, but it was kind of part of my "Leo" persona.

Now I'm back in my frigid homeland and have to learn to readjust my openness gauge again. Being around Norwegians feels incredibly strange to me now. After the initial "hello" or uncomfortable hug (I still screw up and try to hugkiss women out of instinct) Norwegians seem as friendly as warm pudding. Unless you get 8 halfliters into them they don't talk with people they don't know. No one asks you what you do or what the deal is with the mustache (mine's massive now). Questions are answered with a yes or a no and I have a really hard time getting 3 people I could call friends here. The typical Mexican reponse to this is that Norwegians are cold, but if you know them well or have family here you know that it's not the case. Norwegians are a very warm and caring people. So what's going on?

I've come to the conclusion that again, it's all about the weather as with most anything here. After 10,000 years of living in this icepit we've gotten extremely good at planing and going things right. Every day I walk past elegantly designed and thoughtfully built houses, fences, buss stops and postboxes which will stand up to the beating of the wind and snow for a hundred years. Clients here have no problem spending money and time to do a proper definition of how something should be built while in Mexico you'd better have a few hundred lines of code ready by the end of the initial kick-off meeting. Things better last, because you don't want to be the guy stuck fixing a leak when it's below 20 outside. You don't want to have the roof collapse under a few metric tons of snow.

And it appears that the same goes for relationships. By instinct and maybe even out of experience Norwegians will take the same time to plan a relationship (try spending 3 months stuck in a winter cabin with an asshole). Before getting close and personal people here actually take time to make sure it's a person they want to be around and more importantly if it's someone they can make a long term emotional investment in. This must really suck for impulsive people who can make a poor judgment once and get socially excluded for ever. And I guess that I often did the same in Mexico not even bothering to shake hands with people I didn't care to know. Rudeness and what seemed like shyness was just me assessing a persons long term potential as an acquaintance

Midnight Burlesque

On Friday I went with some girlfriends to watch a show called Midnight Burlesque where an aquaintance was performing. As you can see from the pictures the event was a smashing success and possibly the most inspiring feminist entertainment I've ever seen. In a world where all women are supposed to be abnormally skinny with double D tits it was a wonderfull refreshment to see these ladies strut their stuff on stage and have a little fun with their sexuality. In order to get into character I shaved most of my beard leaving a grat big mustache, borrowed a fedora hat and got ahold of some suspenders.

Bang bang, I shot you down

Spent the weekend at my mother's place and practiced shooting clay pigeons for a hunt I'm going on later this month. It's not really my thing to play with lethal weapons, but it's not quite the same thing in this context. At the end I was getting quite good at it.

Gustavo

I find that I'm fascinated by people who make music. My neighbor in Mexico, Leo Heiblum, used to play music at odd times and especially at the end I tried to participate a little. I'm not talking about making studio quality stuff, just people who can pick up a guitar, or tabla or whatever and play for a few minutes. There's something very human and comforting in these situations and for me it's something very new as most of my family has no musical skill whatsoever (although my sisters have some). Personally I can't play anything, but I think there might be hope for me with Guitar Hero. Yesterday I ended up at Gustav's place with Elin where we made some food and talked about nothing. Gustav is one of these strange people who don't quite fit in any box and encompasses a vast amount of interests and skills.

Being around these people also helps to push me in the direction of picking up my painting again.

Firsts

Today was a day of firsts.

On Friday I picked up a new board, bindings and shoes since my old equipment is all over the place and it appears that the bindings are broken. Yesterday it was snowing all day, but today I woke up at 8:30 to clear skies and 10cm of new snow. It turns out that there's a ski center within walking distance from my house. So I geared up and headed into the forest with an orange and some chocolate in my backpack. The forest was quiet and without a soul in sight. The sun shone though the snow covered trees and I didn't break a sweat by the time arrived to the deserted lifts. After some quick adjustments with the screwdriver I was on top of the hill looking down on the city and further out into the Oslo fjord. The scene was postcard perfect. It took me a few minutes of unsteady turns, but I soon found my rhythm. As I hit the first patch of new powder I was in heaven, silently gliding on top of white cotton in the middle of a frozen forest.

After I few hours I painfully rediscovered muscles I hadn't used for a few years and the hills filled with families teaching their kids the fundamentals of skiing. I walked back to my house passing dozens of people on cross-country skis, all smiling and happy. We complain a lot about winter, but it's quite obvious that we belong here.

This afternoon I also made tortillas for the first time in my life. I found a shop that sell both coriander (Cilantro) and manzanillo chiles so I decided to get out my Maseca tortilla flour and try to make some decent Mexican food. The salsa turned out quite good, but as always, not spicy enough. I made some guacamole and heated up some "Meksikanske" beans to go with a alambre dish. The tortilla making turned out to be quite a challenge. Getting them evenly flat and avoiding that they stick to things is tricky. I had to craft a makeshift non-stick surface from a ziplock bag. Two big boards served as a press with myself standing on them in order to get the right amount of pressure. The first one looked more like a small pancake and the next 3-4 suffered from cracked edges and burns, but I finally got the hang of it and make some that worked.

Overall a perfect sunday.

There's no place like home

As a kid we moved quite a lot. In my first 12 years of education I managed to go to 11 different schools. One of things it taught me was that home was whatever place I kept my stuff it, be it in our one and only purchased house or the hotel suite we stayed in Houston for about 2 months while we waited for our stuff to arrive in a container from Norway. When I left Mexico last November I expected it to work the same way this time. I'd pack up 50kg of crap, drag it to the other side of the planet and instantly make a new home on Oslo. After being back in Mexico to visit my wife and friends I'm starting to think that it might get more complicated as you grow older and attach yourself of certain places and the people there. I feel much more at home in Mexico, even when I'm not in the city, but in Diego's house at Zicatela beach. At the same time there are certain aspects about Norway that also makes it home. Even if I complain about the weather here I can't help myself from getting just a little bit emotional when watching the snow fall and there are certain ways about how the Norwegians act that makes me realize that no matter how many tacos I eat at the end of the day I'm always going to be different in Mexico.

So home is now a feeling and not a place, a feeling of being calm and safe and surrounded by people you love and not by familiar things. This is great because it makes it much more flexible, but it also makes it harder to get there. Harder because I used to go home to my apartment in order to relax and feel at home and now I have to learn to relax in order to feel at home.

This Christmas and New Years was exhausting and I expect that it's only a preview of how the rest of this year will turn out. The idea of having Oslo and Mexico City as bases seems quite good if it weren't for the 20 hours of travel it takes from one place to the next. The whole notion of friends is also more complicated now. I've always just left them behind and forgotten about them when I moved before, but I now have people in my life who I want to keep close for a very long time. The Internet is all well and great, but you need more than a postcard amount of communication in order to have a significant relationship with anyone. The only advantage the Internet provides is that you can avoid having to give a compressed summary of the events on your life when you see people again, but the real stuff takes place over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.

Some more pictures from the trip to Zicatela and Guadua: