The Mini Queen's post-it mania

The new apartment is about 42 square meters and the balcony gives a view of the street lined up with several buildings on both sides. It’s on the fifth floor so this view from the balcony looks like a mini version of Karl Johans Gate. If I’m not mistaken, Karl Johans Gate is Oslo’s main street, the view to which, maybe, if you stand in the royal palace’s balcony, what you would see.

Karl Johans.

This was what I thought the first time I checked the apartment.
It was T who pointed it out to me that this should be how it felt like if you were standing in the royal palace.

Balcony. Mini Queen.

Today is our third day here, and my first night alone. There is a BBC detective TV series playing in the background. I need some noise to distract me from:
1. thinking I wasted my day by not finishing a chapter of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
2. imagining scenes from Asian horror films
3. thinking too much

T should be back two hours from now. He’s out for a birthday dinner. I didn’t want to go to this dinner. Most days I get too tired socializing with people. And besides, we can save money if there was only one of us going out to this dinner. We have this Switzerland and Vienna trip by the end of May and we need to make 6000 NOK fit this one-week trip.

I’m sitting in the dining/kitchen table with some of the books I’ve read (now that we’ve transferred to this bigger apartment, I can get my books from Fåvang and transfer them here to Oslo). I just wanted to write on paper, so I’m going through some lines I like from some stuff that I’ve read. Like these:

1. She didn’t have the same energy she used to have and over the years she’d wasted too much adrenaline and anxiety on disasters that had never had the decency to occur.

This is from Marian Keyes’ The Brightest Star in the Sky. I started reading this one last summer while at Fjærland while on that summer job at a hotel. It was interesting enough in the beginning, but I think the fjord, the glacier, the books on display in shelves lining the fjord, the 100-plus-year-old hotel were too delicious to experience and I had to put down Marian Keyes.

2. It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

This is from Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. This book is very promising and even making me read every morning on the bus to work (that is if there are no colleagues in the same bus with me, because then I would have to talk to them).

3. I believe those three words “We want you” were enough to cause my brain to rewire itself, and from then on, I would require MORE than other people.This one’s from Augusten Burroughs’ short story, Commercial Break (most probably what turned out to be one of the beginnings of his Running with Scissors. Or maybe written after the book? A chapter that can’t be squeezed in the book and had to be dropped altogether?).

The TV series is still playing on my iPad. This is turning out to be a very looooong episode, like a movie, two hours I think. Or maybe this is a movie? I think that the killer is the chauffeur. That’s it. He killed the 24-year-old actress in the story. Uhmmm, I’m wrong. About this being a movie, I mean. This is a TV series. There’s another story in it. About the head of the whole team not getting his promotion and all. So yes, there must be several episodes before this.

My nails are dry now. And I think what I’m half-watching is about to end. I think I may be actually wrong. The junkie flatmate of the murdered actress seems to be the killer. Or at least the writer of this episode wants me to believe so. If not, why let the junkie harm one of the detectives? Either ways, it’s almost done. I think I need to drink more coffee and call T. Ask him what time he’s coming home.