Day light savings saves my life

October has come and passed and the days have gotten so short that when the sun starts to set in the early afternoon i laugh to myself and say in a southern accent, in my head of course, i worked hard from sun up to sun down. whaha. that's only like seven hours! the sun was starting to set a little bit before five when the hour increment came out of the bureaucratic brilliance of some calendar nerd's silly head. it used to be exciting because, i don't know it meant that you felt like you got an extra hour of sleep. maybe you could trick yourself into going to bed a little earlier. here its like a greenwich angel come to save your sanity from the grips of a dark lunch.

but its been a crazy month. i've made some new pals, got in on a film festival, toured the nobel peace center (twice), watched all the leaves turn yellow and then all the trees strip down, felt the weather go from nippy at night to cold in the afternoon, got to watch the debates with the democrats abroad in norway, got offered speed at the train station...in norwegian!...went to a guzzillion thrift stores in one day, missed the last train home, walked across town because i missed the last train home, got my insurance coverage (what, what? take that hmo's), but the best thing, and the hardest to explain -- all of the sudden one morning i woke up and i felt like i was at home. taking the bus into town seeing little blond boys and arab women and hipsters and old men on bicycles and junkies wedged up between three hundred year old walls, two hundred year old cobblestone and fifty year old trash cans. street vendors selling bright colored fruit that you know had to be shipped in from somewhere oceans away from here. last names that mean wolf man in old norsk. slicked back hair that somehow floats in place, perfect, crazily arian. crazy sunsets on aker brygge with views of the castle and islands off shore. near misses with the trikk plowing along the tracks in streets so narrow you can tell they were never meant for cars, until cars showed up.

i really like it here, and i'm not so surprised when i turn every corner. i can predict things now and laugh at things that i didn't realize were ironic before. i'm starting to get these norwegians i think. and i like them. i'm not sure if i can hang with the weather changes, but it hasn't started to snow yet and when it does, i'm sure it will be so stunning that i won't be stressing about the cold.