#5 - what if?

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

this is the last installment. it has been a very interesting assignment and i have even discovered a few things along the way (the thing about reagan) and confirmed others (the iPod posting proves what we have long suspected--i have a very deep shallow streak). i think i'll try to come up with some other writing assignments for myself in the coming weeks. if there are any ideas/suggestions out there, please do leave a comment!

this last of the 5 people, places or things that have had a big effect on my life is another professor. as i pondered this one, i found myself thinking how different my life would be if i'd never met her.

if i'd never signed up for a graduate course called intro to comparative literature during my first semester at playboy magazine's #1 party school, i might not ever have met elizabeth horan. 

i was interested in comp lit because i thought i eventually wanted a ph.d. in it. in fact, i had applied to a ph.d. program (only one, silly me) and didn't get in because i had had only russian lit and thus nothing to compare, so i found myself seeking another master's degree, in humanities, to try to get something to compare to the russian stuff.

if i hadn't taken that course, i wouldn't have:

• had my first exposure to magical realism.
• or reception theory.
• or had my first thoughts on the implications of translation on the literary work.
• met two fantastic and interesting people who i am still friends with to this day.
• had a truly fantastic discussion about the poetry of osip mandelstam and anna akhmatova.
• found my voice and thus my confidence in the graduate classroom (despite already having a master's degree when i started, i wouldn't say i'd really found my graduate feet).
• met the professor who would head my thesis committee.

and i certainly wouldn't have signed up for another of prof. horan's courses:  nobel prize winners from north and south america. and if i hadn't done that, i wouldn't have:

• made the completely hilarious and annoyingly consistent mistake of referring to the swedish academy as the "swiss" academy throughout the bit i wrote for a group assignment! (in fact, i still haven't lived that one down!)
• suggested that a figure like camille paglia might eventually win a nobel prize for literature (i was a bit off there, but i intentionally wanted to go for a longshot and my arguments were good).
• i wouldn't have stuck my foot in my mouth about annoying high school teachers who thought they could fit in in graduate courses, saying it TO one of said annoying high school teachers. (sigh...we learn from these experiences).
• had the chance to prepare in depth and teach a session on octavio paz.
• read a whole lot more gabriel garcia marquez and pablo neruda and gabriele mistral.
• gone out to casey moore's for beers and wings twice a week with the gang after class.

i adored prof. horan's teaching style. she was very laid back and very much let the course be student-driven. we took turns presenting the assigned readings and it went a long way towards preparing us both as researchers and as teachers, which is more than most graduate programs do.

but the most important thing she did for me was point out a poster for meetings regarding applying for fulbright scholarships. she said, "you should go, they'd be crazy not to give you one." i was blown away. i hadn't even been considering it. what would i research? where would i go? how would i pitch it? would they really give one to me? but those are prestigious! how could that be?

so i went to the meeting. it seemed that the #1 party school year after year wanted to shed that image and raise their academic reputation (and in all honesty, at the graduate level, it was awesome--very engaged teachers and students all around!). they saw helping their students gain fulbrights as one way of doing that. and help us they did. there were 7 or 8 of us receiving a fulbright that year.

and prof. horan was probably the biggest help to me of all, not only by suggesting i apply, but in helping me shape my application (she'd had at least one herself, so she knew how it all worked), but also writing me what my dad called the mother of all recommendation letters. it was like having a letter from god that would open any door. and although i hardly recognized myself in it, i was and will be eternally grateful for the kind words that were there.

but the biggest "what if" in this is that if it hadn't all gone as it did, i wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time to meet that lovely danish boy who is now my husband (and has been for nearly 10 years!) and i shudder to think about that. i would have lived a completely different life without elizabeth horan. so i am forever grateful to her for all that she taught me--both in the classroom and about myself and even more so for the guidance she gave. she definitely steered me in the right direction.

#4 - ode to the iPod

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

after three days of serious entries, it's time for a bit of levity.

i give you the iPod...ahem, or should i say iPods:

we have quite a lot of iPods in our household (those above are only mine, husband and sabin also have several) and 3 docking units with speakers to play them from. this is actually because of the importance of music in the daily life of our household. but could it be just any old MP3 player? no it could not. it must be the iPod. why? why the obsession with this particular little gadget?

because they're just so damn sexy. good design is very important in scandinavia and that has clearly rubbed off on me in my ten years here. i LOOOOooove the design of the iPod.  they're beautiful, sleek, shiny and even sparkly if you add bling like i did to my white 30GB one. (our friends refer to that one as the porn pod because they think it's almost pornographic that i blinged it out like i did.) (you can buy those stickers all ready made to just stick on.)

it all started when husband brought home a little black nano that his boss gave him as a christmas present 3 years ago. whoa, that was cool! and it was enough for the first year, until he left it on in the little pocket in the side of the seat along with his new bose headphones on SK944 ORD-CPH.  damn those business class seats. we were iPodless again and something had to be done.

at first, i thought i could get along with just one, the white blinged out one. 30GB is a lot of music. 5,924 songs, 9 videos and 135 photos to be exact. but then one day, it was full. and i still had other things i wanted on it. and i didn't want to throw away anything that was already there. so i got another one, a black 30GB one. and when nike came out with that running shoe tie-in, i had to get the green nano because i was SURE to start running regularly if only i had that. (strangely, that hasn't really worked, hmmm...) and let's face it, it's better to use a shuffle for running (we each have one of those too, i just forgot to include it in the picture). 

then, they went and changed the design of the nano. one couldn't be seen in the gold lounge with the old model, right? that wouldn't do at all. and i began to want them for different purposes. the smaller black nano has only podcasts on it, for example. and it's easiest to carry in my purse. 

then, my dear sister bought me the iPod Touch, which is the most beautiful, sexiest one of all. and which has only my "music of the moment" on it, since it's only 8GB, you can be selective about it and not use it really for storage, but for the best bits. i tend to carry it and the nano around in my purse, the big ones stay at home in the docking stations now, but at least one of them is playing all day long.  

it's odd that a small gadget can bring such joy, but it really can. i love getting out my iPod on the train and lovingly putting it away when i reach my destination, just seeing it when i do that makes me smile. i wouldn't get through all the painting i've done this week and have yet to do without the Scissor Sisters or the latest Alanis on full blast to accompany my brushstrokes.

music has such a capacity to soothe when you're wound up, or to get your heart rate up when you're feeling lazy. it can put you back in a good mood when you've had a bad day. it can underline your bad mood if you feel like wallowing in it. you can get it all out of your system, just by listening to the right song. it's so great that music is so portable now, so you have the ability to change your mood right there tucked inside your Crumpler (which is also brilliant design, i must say).

and tomorrow the 3G iPhone will be released, also in denmark! i'm so excited!!

#3 - the grandest inquisitor

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand. 

i have had a lot of fun thinking about this assignment that i've given myself this week and yesterday was quite surprised where the thinking and the writing took me.  let's see what happens today. this is installment 3.

today, i know exactly who i want to write about, but not really where to begin.

time: late 80s-early 90s

place: large university in the midwest

after following the advice of my new age russian teacher in southern california to pursue my russian studies, i went back home to the midwest and enrolled in a russian program at a large state university. having had russian 101-2 as a night course, it wasn't long before i found myself in over my head in russian 201, so thanks to the kindness of two professors, after a few weeks, i was allowed to switch to russian 102. what a relief that was! not least because of the wonderful professor teaching the course, harry weber. his kindness and patience got me through and although i'm not sure i ever fully recovered my confidence where russian as a language was concerned--it was never easy for me, i just loved it passionately--he enabled me to think it was possible to keep doggedly pursuing it.

as is often the case in language departments, the professors teach both literature and the language itself, so where prof. weber came to mean so much to me was in a 19th century russian literature course. under his guidance, we did close readings of pushkin, turgenev, gogol, dostoevsky, tolstoy--all the biggies! and i felt a whole world opening up for me. i had actually read war & peace as a kid, mostly because i wanted to tackle such an enormous book. but harry opened up the whole historical, philosophical expanse of that baggy monster and i learned to appreciate it so much more. 

aside:  actually, i never really came to love tolstoy, he's so preachy and righteous that other than sebastopol sketches, i never really became a tolstoy person. and it might be that i got that from harry as well, because last year he admitted in an email that he never really liked tolstoy much either. i had asked him to help my sister, who was disturbed by reading anna karenina, see the redeeming qualities in that book and he said that he didn't really think there were any. which, in its own way was a comfort because it validated my sister's feelings about the book.

the 19th century lit course led to a course with prof. weber on tolstoy & dostoevsky. the highlight of that course was an intense couple of weeks on the brothers karamazov. i just looked at my dog-eared copy of it as i sat down to write this and just looking at the marginalia and highlighting and underlining i did at that time takes me back. i positively devoured brothers k--even reading 120 pages of it while driving (along a straight, sparsely trafficked interstate) because i simply couldn't put it down. in wanted to BE each brother in turn, tho' ivan was my favorite with his rationality and his intellect. i could relate to the desire to careen around manically following my emotions and obsessions like mitya and some part of me wished i could be good and pious like alyosha. the discussions we had on the course were intense and masterfully led and provoked by prof. weber. which is why i called this posting the grandest inquisitor...he asked questions and pushed us to explore answers and it opened up a whole world for us. or at least it did for me.

i loved reading before that, but in his courses and under his tutelage, i learned to love books and to appreciate them so much more deeply than i had previously. it's something that remains with me to this day and could only have been emparted by a wonderful teacher. i also learned that it was ok not to like some of the books. before that i had been intimidated into thinking that you MUST love all of the classics. harry taught me that that wasn't necessary.

there are two more books which harry opened my eyes to:  mikael bulgakov's master & margarita (where there is another encounter with the inquisitor, hmm, i might have to explore the implications of that another time) and andrei bitov's pushkin house. that was later in a graduate literature course. 

i'd already read master & margarita in 20th century russian lit, so the graduate course reading was a repeat. each student on the course had to present a book in turn and i was sure i'd get stuck with something i didn't want. i sat there, crossing my fingers that i'd get m&m and couldn't believe my luck when it was still available when it came to me.

i spent weeks preparing my presentation--fear of humiliation before my fellow graduate students overruling my normal inclination towards procrastination. i researched everything i could get my hands on that had been written about it and in the end settled on a bakhtinian reading of it as menippian satire. it was my first intense research project and i learned so much from it. i went in several times for guiding discussions and always came away feeling i'd been pushed by harry to find my own answers and thoughts. socratic method used subtly on me to help me grow as a scholar. only a fantastic teacher is truly able to do that.

bitov's pushkin house was the final book of the semester and it somehow spoke to me. it fit with the postmodern theory i was reading in another graduate course that semester, so i could read it through the lens of kristeva (arguably not postmodern, i realize, but a transition figure between structuralism and postmodernism, as i read her) and derrida. but perhaps it was simply a main character who felt fragmented and unreal in the face of the world around him was just something i could relate to as a 20-something graduate student who was struggling to come into her own. i wrote an essay on the book for the final exam and received an A+ from harry. it was one of those times when the pen was simply a conduit directly to my thoughts and my brain was in the zone. the question must have been a perfect one for me (i no long remember exactly what it was), again, the perfect question posed by the grandest of inquisitors.

harry is retired now, but i always go and visit him and his wife nellie when i'm back in the US. they are the kind of people, living the kind of life that husband and i aspire to when we reach their age. they are engaged with the world, well-traveled, thoughtful, wonderful conversationalists. we play cards with them when we're there. we laugh and laugh and tell stories and laugh some more. they are a joy to be around. i feel privileged to have had harry as my teacher and mentor and most importantly as my friend. 

#2 - not what i thought it was going to be

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

when i was in junior high, at the height of ronald reagan's cold war escalation rhetoric, there was a made for t.v. movie starring jason robards called the day after. (leave it to a B movie actor to use a B movie as a medium for his propaganda.) it was, looking back, prototypical cold war propaganda, and basically showed kansas being nuked off the map by the evil russians. i'd been to kansas and while it wasn't my favorite place in the world, it was a little too much like the flat prairie, amber waves of grain of my home state for comfort. and the movie called attention to the fact that where i was growing up was probably in some danger...within fallout range of strategic air command near omaha, nebraska.

the movie made a big impression on me and for years afterwards, i imagined that somewhere in russia was a girl who looked a whole lot like me and if we could just talk to each other and get to know one another, then all that cold war mumbo jumbo wouldn't really be necessary.

so, years later, when i got the chance to take an evening class in russian at a community college, i jumped at it. i was still idealistically picturing my "sister" in russia as i slaved over the cyrillic alphabet and all those cases...accusative, genitive, dative...i still shudder a bit thinking of those. by then, reagan was in the last stages of his presidency...the bits he didn't really remember anyway, and nancy was running the country together with her astrologer (which in retrospect, wasn't really so bad).

that whole zeitgeist fit nicely with the very spiritual, authentic, red-haired russian woman who was teaching my evening course. i loved her. she loved shirley maclaine's spiritual journey, which was so in vogue at the time, and made dramatic declarations about the future of people in the course. hers for me was that she could feel that i should keep studying russian, that it was my destiny. i was 19 and looking for my destiny, so i thought, "why not?" i was a bit romantic on the notion of russian anyway, so it was as good a destiny as any. within a few short years, i found myself with bachelor's and master's degrees in, you guessed it, russian. self-fulfilling destiny?

i even found myself in the middle of russia, standing at a bus stop together with some friends, waiting to go out to their dacha, when an old man came up and asked me and my friend aida if we were indeed sisters, just as i had suspected all along! i really did have a "sister" in russia and if we just knew one another and could talk, we wouldn't need all that cold war mumbo jumbo.

you may think this story ends there, but i'm not really to that influential person yet.

not long after that, i was in a literary theory course (pursuing yet another master's, i just couldn't seem to get enough). we had to write weekly 1-2 page essays on our reading assignments. being a good marxist (since the only ones left by that time were in american universities), i found a way to weave the evils of capitalism and trickle down economic policies into my reactions to the readings week after week. finally, the professor scrawled in the margin of one essay, "you make me feel old. it's clear that ronald reagan is really the defining president for you."

and that's why that as much as i am loathe to admit it, ronald reagan, B movie actor turned president, is one of my 5 big influences. even if it was an influence borne of loathing, it still significantly guided the direction of my life.

epilogue (or is it actually prologue?): i can still remember when he was shot in 1981, it was semester test time at school and we were about to be dismissed for the day when they made an announcement over the loudspeakers that the president had been shot. i asked a tad too hopefully, "is he dead?" and my teacher, clearly a staunch republican, flew into a rage and made the entire class stay after school because of my disrespectful comment regarding the president. already then, he was effecting my life. at that point, i didn't really imagine just how much.

#1 - Susie, horse trainer extraordinaire

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand. 

so, i start with susie.  

i grew up showing horses. i think i was sent into the showring with merrylegs, my little dapple grey pony, clad in the cutest little red and black pants, at about the age of 4. i had no idea what i was doing but it was a halter class so no real harm could come of that. merrylegs was a good pony and i walked out with a big shiny blue trophy (that's no doubt still somewhere in my parents' basement). probably just because we were so darn cute.

i graduated from local shows to quarter horse shows and even had a few years in the rough and tumble rodeo world (as rough and tumble as 4-H rodeos can get)--what i most recall about those was a vast quantity of mud. then, we got paints and pintos and started going to the state association shows.  

we did it all--from showmanship to english pleasure to western pleasure, trail, reining and western riding--even barrels and poles if we were going for the all-around award. i had a lot of horses during those years...bee's star bar, i'm a susie bar, jolene, keelo kandy, tickleweed, spooky, skip's galley lad, top hand, switch, chilli's hot stuff, kitty, ted, suzie q, fred and especially sary (more about her later).

at the black hills pinto shows, i first encountered susie. she was a trainer, showing other people's horses and doing it well. she was dressed smarter than anyone else and in the black hills pinto association, they had settled on their number at the beginning of the year.  aside: you always have a number on your back when you show, since the judge doesn't know you, so you can be called on when you win, of course. :-)  susie's number was 222 and she had made beautiful versions of it in oval and heart shapes in black or green to match all of her outfits. i was in awe. and so wanted to be 222 at any show where susie wasn't there.

she also showed paints and her own mare, diamond h pansy, was my very dream of a horse (i eventually owned her sister, diamond h suzie q). susie was showing her at the same time as i showed skip's galley lad. i think one of the horses susie showed was the association's all around horse the same year (was in 1982?) that i was all around youth with skip's galley lad. 

but it wasn't until i got Indians Adversary, a handsome bay tobiano mare, that i actually started to work with susie. it was a dream come true for me! the folks sent me to live with susie out near the black hills (263 miles from home) for that summer. i actually slept in the living quarters of the big horse trailer that summer, since susie and her husband and son lived in a little trailer house and there wasn't really room for me. 

i learned so much--not only about handling my horse, but the whole spectrum. i probably grew up more and got to know myself better during those 3 months than at any other time in my life. i wasn't allowed to be the little snot hot-shot who was there to work with the trainer. no, a big part of what i did was muck stalls and move bales and sacks of grain. i got up early to feed. i learned to appreciate the soothing sound of a horse crunching grain in the early morning and the quality of the light and quiet that an early summer morning has.

i got kicked by a horse named TJ and had such a solid hoof-shaped bruise on my leg that you could read the brand of the shoe in the bruise. i learned about medicating and worming horses that needed it. and i worked with not only my own horse, but some of the others susie had in training. lunging them and hosing them down after a workout. in short, i really learned about hard work and how it was essential to achievement. i did that by soaping saddles and cleaning equipment, as well as by training for hours every day with my own horse.

we showed all over the upper midwest that summer--hauling off somewhere every weekend--colorado, wyoming, nebraska, kansas, oklahoma, and of course south dakota. we changed flat tires (two on the trailer on the way to longmont). we laughed. we sang in the car--dead skunk was especially popular. we ate junk food and great food in nice restaurants. we were dog tired at the end of days. we drove hundreds of miles. and we won lots of ribbons and points. i achieved my youth championship and my mare beat the world champion in one halter class in wyoming. i had moments of pride and moments of disappointment and i learned from susie to handle both gracefully.

when we were at home, susie taught me to make chinese food. i learned how to cut out a new pair of chaps. i upgraded my show clothes under her influence--she always had style where that was concerned. i learned so much that summer--all of which has translated into a life lived unafraid of trying new things and acceptance of the hard work that goes behind success. it was the experience of a lifetime.

there were other summers that i was back there with other horses, but none really could compare to that first summer i spent with susie and my horse sary. the picture below is from one of those later summers:

that's susie seated on the director's chair in the middle.

my sister on king frederik on the left.

suzie q and me on king kitty next.

and some of the others who susie worked with on down the line.

i'm very grateful for the lessons i learned from susie that summer, they have served me well throughout my life ever since. i'm not sure she was consciously or intentionally teaching me about myself, or maybe she was. but whatever the case was, i learned so much. today she would probably be called a life coach and be able to charge thousands for the lessons. :-) but i think what she really did was teach me by example and i came to think that life lived any other way wasn't an option. i was privileged to have had the opportunity to work with her. thank you susie!

that sunday evening feeling

although it's summer holiday time, since we're just at home and not really going anywhere this year because there's so much work to do on the house, i find myself wanting to feel what i call my "sunday evening feeling." that feeling that you are prepared for the week ahead. the dishes are done. the laundry is done. you've vacuumed. and in my case, i've put the garden in order, or at least gone a long way towards doing so. everything so that i can face the challenges the week will bring.

one of the things i've done is ponder what i'd like to write in the week ahead. since my hand isn't really getting that much better, i have to conserve my typing, so i must carefully consider (notice that i don't really consider NOT writing anything--i'm choosing to think of this as a good thing) what i will write. inspired by the summer column on page 2 of the culture section of my daily newspaper, i'm going to write a week's worth of postings on people, places or things that have had a big effect on my life, 3 of them are people, one is a horse and one is a country. at least as i feel right now, that may change as i begin to write them, my writing has a way of doing that, taking me off in directions i hadn't anticipated.

other than that, this week i must:

1. prepare and submit my first VAT statement
2. paint the købmandsdisk (yes, this is an encore appearance for this task)
3. help move everything out of the addition into the writing house
4. eat healthy foods!
5. exercise every day!
6. do something creative every day!
7. write article for Scanorama
8. some consulting work tasks (separate list)
   
9. take pictures every day!
10. find a small table/chairs for the greenhouse
11. finish cleaning all of the glass for the greenhouse
12. avoid cutting myself while doing so
13. finish up the last two beds of the upper garden, sweep and get new shell gravel stuff
14. take bike in for a tune-up
15. make pillows for the iron bench in the upper garden

what will your week bring?