The Seated View

How were your holidays? I hope they were fantastically wonderful and that you got to have a lot of rest. Personally, I’m not quite done with sleeping yet, but here we are back in the active part of the calendar yet again. As my thinking processes are still being dragged kicking and screaming into 2018, I thought I’d start with something fairly easy (for both of us). Something random and chatty seemed to be a good way to kick off a brand new year. Oh, snap with the cold snap via GIPHY   As Santa arrived in Canada from the North Pole bringing presents for all good boys and girls, he also brought a polar vortex with him. Perhaps he doesn’t give coal anymore? Or maybe it was never that,   but someone misunderstanding the term and actually what the Naughty List gets is C-O-L-D. If that’s the case, we have been very, very Naughty indeed. There are parts of Canada that are colder than the North Pole, and Arctic, and Mars . One of those places is Toronto, whi...

via GIPHY In the past few months, I’ve gotten really good at limiting how much I was doing. This was after I had to take time off for the second time in six months to cater to a body that didn’t like my stress levels. I’ve learned that when you have PTSD , there is a certain level of constant stress in your body. No really, Lene? Well, some days are blonder than others … What I didn’t realize was that my normal levels of activity — work, medical appointments, meetings, volunteering, spending time with friends and family – together added up to a certain level of stress (even good stress is stress). Under normal circumstances, it was something I could handle. But now that PTSD is underneath it all, my normal routine puts me past the limit of what my body can deal with. Which means I had to reduce my normal routine or my body would make me sorry. Interesting, isn’t it? And then September happened and all that went out the window. I’ve been writing a fair bit, ...

What do you know about North Korea? If you’re like me, the answer is “not much,” and that’s no accident. The country is notoriously isolated by its ruler and regime, closed up to the world outside in a much the same way as communist countries like the USSR and China. Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite opens up the country, but not in any government-sanctioned way. The author, Suki Kim , is a journalist based in New York City who went undercover as an ESL teacher at an evangelical university in Pyongyang. She had been researching and writing about North Korea for years, and got the opportunity to teach at a university for the sons of the elite. In the beginning of the book, Kim shared the preparations she had to make, and the long list of what she couldn’t do and say. This included basic things, such as talking to the citizens of Pyongyang and her students about much of anything about the outside world. It was made clear ...