Wednesday 13 October 1999

Magazine

Pic of the day: Latest issue of Psychology Today. This issue also has a small sidebar article "Writing off illness" that trumpets the health benefit of writing journals, and in particular if you write about your stressful experiences. The test subjects were patients with asthma or arthritis. Of those who got to express their anxiety on paper, 50% showed a large improvement in their disease after four months.

There is not a word about whether the opposite is true: That writing about your happiness will make you ill...

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To my pleasant surprise, I woke from the clock radio today, not from gasping for breath. It felt great. The radio was talking about a military coup in Pakistan. I think this may be the first time the military has actually taken over a nation with nuclear weapons, so I can see how it could worry some people. Not that I would trust the former civilian government particularly much more on that issue.

The world may not know, but Pakistani are actually the most famous and one of the larger groups of immigrants in Norway. If memory serves, this harks back to the glorious days after there was found oil in the North Sea, and the general feeling in Norway was that we were rich, rich, rich. And during the then economic boom, there was a lack of workers (as there partly is today). So we allowed a fairly large number of work immigrants from a tentatively allied nation, Pakistan, to come and take the jobs that we deemed to be beneath our station.

And for the first time, Norway got a racial issue. We were experts on other people's racial issues, the guiding light of the world. Some people may mention the fact that our boreal aboriginals, the Saami, were forbidden their old religion and any traditions possibly related to it; that their children went to schools where only Norwegian was spoken. But they lived in Norway, didn't they? Of course they should speak Norwegian. And they were not a separate race. They were just some people who spoke a strange and funny language and dressed in strange colors and thought that reindeer were more important than hydropower. To be a race, you must have a deviant skin color. The Pakistani had that.

So we got Pakistani jokes. We got Pakistanis doing the jobs that we were too white to do. We got damned Muslim heathens who thought that their girls were too good for our boys, but obviously not the other way around. We got the minorities that breed like rabbits and were going to crowd us out of our own country and set up mosques everywhere instead of churches. And we cared nothing about the country they came from, except to know that it was still there - so they could go home, if they did not like meatballs.

Time has passed. And the Pakistanis are still here. More than ever. Some go back to Pakistan. Some marry in Pakistan and come back with their families. Some could hardly care less about Pakistan: They speak and write Norwegian fluently but don't know any Urdu, they want to live like us and just be normal citizens. But since they retain the slightly darker skin color, we can't see any difference between the Norwegian-only speaking student who wants to become a Norwegian teacher, and the Muslim fundamentalist that sends his sister to Pakistan to have her killed for losing her virginity before marriage. They are all the same to us.

And now there has been a military coup in their country. I bet that lifts the spirit of many a good Norwegian. It just goes to show that they are born inferior. So they better shut up and go back to the trash jobs, while we continue to teach the world how to handle its racial problems. We are, after all, world champions.

There is some irony above, but it's anybody's guess where the facts end and the irony starts.

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In much lighter news, I seem to accidentally have coined a new euphemism today: "To calibrate the potentiometer." If so, I hereby place it in the public domain. I suspect those who need it will understand what it alludes to.

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For your information, I just snipped about half the entry to get it down to a reasonable size. How do you feel about that? Do you think I write too much, too little? You see, I typically write a lot more than I upload. Sometimes I delete, sometimes I condense, sometimes I write it again later. Deleting is the hardest part of writing, and a good editor makes or breaks a book. But I am not writing a book, and I am my own editor, though I do not feel competent as one. I am a writer by nature, and the editing part feels clumsy for me. Any hints are greedily appreciated. :)


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