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there is a point where you realize all the dreams you have about someone you're with have become dark, lonely affairs that wake you with a sad sinking feeling. the other person is distant, guarded, always focused on something else, and when you do try to talk to them you invariably say the wrong thing and they become angry. hence, your principal interactions in dreams with that person are always with other people. yet you retain faith. you remember dreams from before, laughing shared adventures that flowed like creeks on a warm summer day. remember them for a while, anyway.

yuletide practically over now, leaving for oslo tomorrow and the 18:25 from oslo airport to london. stopping over in the capital en route to have a coffee with an old friend / occasional liaison, then perpetrate a closing raid on the final sales-shelves at avalon, the first and original oslo gaming store, which is closing over new year. a sad day- for 15 years, a central landmark of fantastic oslo. I had my first work placement there for a week age 13, making coffee for the clerk and pricing miniatures. at the end of the week they gave me the staff discount of 40%, so I could burn the money from my confirmation. I came home happily loaded with totally useless but profoundly funky-looking game supplements.

in certain matters, sometimes I swear I can not tell whether I am insane, conjuring impossible demands and making bizarre solar eclipses for myself. simultaneously not trusting this, I counter-efface myself and enact the placid patience of a ruminant. both postures are imbalanced, neither is correct or easily discerned. wish for the new year: equanimity and find a balanced ground, see myself more clearly in matters of the heart. is one still allowed to grow up, as one begins to approach 30?

much challenge this year has come in a phenomenal encounter, the immense pleasures associated with it, and the unsuspectedly crazed visceral fears and expectations they engendered. some has come the same way, by osmosis: the way one more or less consciously takes on board the challenge posed by close ones when they live by fundamentally different codes. intersubjective understanding is difficult, but enriches the human. eventually, I will understand this. even if it all seems crazed.

in more general terms, the old figure that a fistful of sand held in a clutching hand pours out more quickly than in an open palm is true, but easy figures are sadly not the language of the world. conversely when the hand is dropped, the sand pours out immediately. thus, a twofold wish: learn to see the hand, and use it when appropriate. not clenched, not limp or listless - lightly clasped. this applies to long-lost friends as it does to lovers and the act of writing.

today: lunched on lobster salad, then a bone-freezing walk; browsing gifted manuscripts, burned-out wastelands, rolling fortress towers, artificial angels battling mutant insect seed in post-apocalyptic skies; a short exchange of texts, on the morrow [note!]; now some pheasant, later some friends.

brought a shower of lovely presents, perhaps my favourite being a pair of sleeve buttons for a suit - mansjettknapper in norwegian? it is indicative of my social habitus in english that I do not know the correct translation. they were amber, inscribed in cyrillic to commemorate the 1980 olympics in moscow. from my mother, of course. also some nostalgic roleplaying books, including a cryptozoological bestiary for a defunct game, some fairtrade coffee, aftershave, a collection of polar novels, a microscopic tarot deck and some homemade fingerless gloves. good loot, all in all.

today, peaceful. bright blinding sun hangs low on the horizon, small groups of cold and brightly-coloured people all over the landscape, walking. two recent incidents of unnatural twisting, one for each leg, give my walk a twice lopsided quality - still, walking it off can only result, at worst, in interesting internal scarification. then some reading, a late afternoon meal, friends in the evening, some not seen since summer. pleasing, all in all.

apologies do many things. recently, I've become acquainted with a type that was new to me. I'll call it the conflagratory apology. the particular variant I have come across has I believe deep roots in catholicism. its distinctiveness comes from its hysterical, exagerated tone, and its implicit ontology. whereas some forms of apology entail an admission of wrongful behaviour and a promise to correct the roots of this behaviour in the future, the conflagratory apology represents a shortcut to and an expression of the apologist's deep sense of being a shit person. as such it is a plea for absolution, forgiveness for a fixed, nearly ontological condition, rather than a promise of responsible correction. its a primal, knee-jerk, bloody thing. its figure is the lacerating atonement of flagellation, rather than correction through reasoned conversation. taken to a pitch, its conversational function hinges on invoking the discomfort and pity of the apologised at the excess of the conflagration, neutralising anger. in practical terms, the conflagratory apology preempts reasoned conversation entirely. it also has little or no consequence: the apologised event will most likely recur. this is I believe because of the way the structure of the apology shields the apologist from personal responsibility, by appealing to a fixed sense of the personal shitness that the apologist is powerless to oppose or modify. "I AM SO SO SO SORRY that I am the kind of person that does this".

wind and earth outside, wet with rain and perfect for a freshfaced walk. yuletide eve tomorrow, and all traces of snow are melted. now, hoovering, taking wood in for the fireplace. all my christmas presents presented preemptively, benevolent heresy, so no need for last-minute wrapping. help with some chores, read musil on the sofa as dark falls outside, with a fresh cup of coffee. soak in all the time I can away from the world of super-trained angst-monkeys.

mother is in recent years perfecting the domestic art of making christmas to a sublime pitch - chocolate-dusted nougat truffles made with fresh raspberry pure, cloudberry sorbets, a veritable rain of homemade cakes. the house is covered with redcapped little nisser, or Norwegian gnomes, and saturated with christmas carols.

slow day today. printed out my five quasi-fleshedout chapter chunks and stapled them, 50 pages single spaced font size 10, just over 40 000 words or half a thesis. moral geographies of ownership and killing; the social space of the fence; abattoirization of herding; a canned history of the curved knife; and an obscure but I think kind of interesting chapter on reindeer welfare. entire sections are in my head or in keyword format, and there is little or no theory yet, except for 2 pages on agamben and 2 short sections on foucault. additionally I need an introduction and a conclusion, say between 5 and 10 000 words each, and I have two more chapters in totally shapeless form, quotes and jottings - one LONG chapter on the circulation of reindeer meat [producing the carcass, food safety regulation, training consumers, meat and identity, politics of state regulation and so bloody on. should be three chapters, really...] and one on the failure of the recent state cull. at this pace I may have to cut at least one of these, maybe even two.

then went for a sprightly sub-zero walk to the other island to rent a film - left my driver's licence in the UK, with spectacular prescience... got a ride in with a friend, rented two movies and got some comics books, walked back. return walk clocked in at just under an hour and a half, perfectly refreshing and good for dislodging those dark thoughts and letting them drift off.

when I got back I consulted the I Ching and got, unsurprisingly, hexagram 56 - The Wanderer - with a transforming first line, turning into hexagram 30 - double fire, or The Clinging. I swear the book of changes has a figurative sense of humour. wryly apt and prodding it is, too. protract no lawsuits, busy myself not with trivial things. fair enough advice.

back in hvasser for a week and a half. the world out here is gray and earthen, windswept, warm and wet, covered with patches of snow. beautiful. the sea is heavy, gray and cumbersome like molten lead, slightly frosted. footprints in wet snow, a few leaves left on the dead bushes.

thank god I'm out of cambridge, and the people there are far far away. my step feels lighter already, thick coating of dark shit melts off like a prisoncage made from chocolate and the world slowly suffuses with light again. get too close to people and you come to share the hells they build for themselves.

my plan for this break is to write a thousand-word project outline for an alien abduction ethnography. that, and depending on the mood, read either simmel's the philosophy of money, or - finally - at least the first part of musil's the man without qualities. on the sly, let go of certain people and the myths they came wrapped in, get used to the pleasure of aloneness again. on the whole, all is good.

going back to norway for a couple of weeks tomorrow, a break before I come back here for NYE and start the long trundling slowmotion slugfest of work leading up to submission sometime towards the end of next year. hopefully.

idle thinking about possible postdoc projects is gradually being supplanted by urgency, as terminus approaches. it is too early yet to scan advertisements and look for jobs, but certainly time to start putting in the serious work required to construct possible projects for independent funding applications. what I needs is a small hand of possible and interesting projects. the problem is an excess of possibilities - the only thing I know for certain is that I don't want to work in the far north any more than I want to shoot a paintgun up my own nostril. beyond that, an impossibly broad panorama opens up of subjects I find interesting and that I think might be fundable, from xenotransplantation and transgenic hamsters to rainforest conservation and the sub-science of alien abductions. all of which can, with some creative latitude, be formulated so as to follow solidly from and expand upon my previous research - which is one of the important factors when evaluating postdoc applications. the problem is commitment.

on the subject of the latter, I just sent off a speculative initial contact email to the head of the anomalistic research unit at goldsmiths in london, who headed a big research project on alien abductions recently. I'll keep you posted on the repercussions.

on that note, I had a strange experience a couple of days ago. coming out of the shower I saw myself in the mirror as a complete and utter stranger. I did not recognize myself at all. for a few seconds, my features were unfamiliar and depressing, the way sometimes the hard faces of passing strangers in a big city depress me, not with their hardness but with the self-imposed narrowings and limitations they enshrine. faces can be transparent, tell a lot about how people have chosen to fashion themselves. for a few seconds, seeing myself as a stranger, I saw more in my features than I wanted to: in them were all my dark moods, the hard narrow worlds and wall-like structures in which I trap myself over time.

the experience was cognitively depressing yet somehow, strangely invigorating: perhaps precisely because the fleeting moment of exteriority promised the possibility of escape from the prisonhouse of self it revealed. the rest of the evening I felt energized, mobile and hopeful. light on my feet.

in a funny, unbalanced up-and-down-place these days, as I have been for some time. in some respects, the whole last year appears as one long exercise in precarious oscillation. given how self-contained, autonomous and balanced I felt around these days last year, this is unwont. but then, at least unbalance gives you something to work with: I may exhaust myself claustrophobically but at least, I'm not bored.

the problem is finding myself, much against my will and better knowledge, invested in something that is both external and difficult, something that is not myself. unnecessary but subjectively real fears are then born from the sense that something important may be at stake. needful fear is a phenomenally potent and self-realizing force. the situation requires equanimity, but equanimity understood not as striking some balance between indifference and need. rather, learning to let go of both. that is, to live self-contained, yet with a full and open heart: to fill the embarrassing holes yourself, not cover them up or fill them with the other.

and in the process, why not, achieve enlightenment too. man, being with others is a fucking difficult thing sometimes.

been a while, huh. unprecedented hiatus over and back in cambridge now, plotting the shapeless havoc of my fieldnotes into semblances of order and aiming for a summer first draft completion terminus of the thesis entire. just around that time my circus of flying pigs should be done training with the active volcano snowball fight sequence, and I'll hit the road to much acclaim with the whole ensemble, peddling copies of the thesis from a stall next to the entrance while inside, squealing pigs bombard the audiences with melting snowballs from above.

I shan't develop here a narrative of the profoundly uneventful return to the field, 'xcept to note that is thankfully over and if I never go back I will die a happy and smiling old man. nor do I intend to promise regular updates: the more smoke the wetter the wood, and the less fire. otherwise all is well, give or take a few. things are such that one comes face to face with certain recurrent psychic faultlines, but then being fully in control is an overrated and rather boring condition, conducive to cardiovascular conditions of the soul. futurological concerns have started rearing their heads, trapped as one is in a dank and narrowing time-tunnel with the light of final-paycheck-day approaching like the headlights of a cocaine-fuelled japanese supertrain. all is not lost however. even if some of my winged piglets fall into the magma before the submission date I should still have some money set aside to bum for a while, join an ashram, grow a revolutionary brand of cisgenic strawberries and achieve eventual monetary enlightenment.