everything is illuminated

things i've learned through observation in recent days (because it was time for a list)...

~  white leggings with a heavy, shapeless white sweater and brown suede pumps on a late october day is a fashion crime in need of an executioner.

~  teenagers crave attention, no matter where you find them. even if they're standing right next to a picasso and a matisse, they will still think you should have all your attention on them and make a lot of strange sounds and statements to achieve this. even if you don't know them.

~  to get along in norwegian, you should know the phrase, ikke sandt (which i may have spelled in danish).

~ i detect glee on the part of my coworkers at the thought that i do not go home to my family in the evenings when i am working here. what is wrong with people?

~ people really don't like it if you do not reveal everything they think you should. even when directly asked. but sometimes there's stuff that's just not people's business.

~ couchsurfing totally rocks. i highly recommend it. you meet interesting people who have traveled and seen things and have both funny and poignant stories to tell. go, sign up your couch right now! :-)

~ i am not hungry for lunch at 10:45 a.m.

~ the dutch make some seriously good headache medicine.

~ norway excels at cinnamon pastries. they're like to die for. exactly the right amount of cinnamon, breadiness and crispy sugar on top. worth a flight to oslo just for them.

~ i miss reading all of your blogs, but i'm writing my little fanny off right now on work stuff, so i have no time to visit. it will ease up in about two weeks.

where are "u?"

my "u" is literally missing. the blocks blew over in the wind coming through the window the other night and i can't find it anywhere. it's a bit like me--i know you're all wondering where i am this week--"j, where are you?"--hence the missing "u." but work calls and as i said yesterday, my words are all being channeled elsewhere at the moment. i should be back to normal (whatever that is) by the end of the week...

my words are elsewhere at the moment

so this will have to do for a monday...

"mobning" in the blogosphere

this may look a little scary

but really it's a totally cool place.

danish has a great word--mobning. i've seen it translated as bullying, but to me, it's a bit more nuanced than that word is in english. it's a word that conveys the whole notion of holding someone outside of your group. intentionally. if you're the parent of a school-age child, you hear the word a lot. because danish schools (or at least the one our daughter attends) are very focused on it and on keeping it from happening, at least to a harmful, overt extent, since you can never really fully prevent it. because everyone needs their albanian. but even an albanian would like to belong.

small aside to explain the last statement: this is one of the earliest theories that husband and i came up with (way back when he was still someone else's husband). we were in the balkans and noticed that everyone there (well, everyone everywhere, really, if i think about it) had someone they looked down on to feel better about their group--the croats and the serbs had each other. and tho' it was never clear to me where the bosnians stood, they had some complex system of someone they looked down on. the bulgarians looked down on the macedonians. the macedonians looked down on the albanians. the albanians looked down on the...hmm. there wasn't really anyone--except maybe the roma and let's face it, everyone looks down on them, so sadly they don't really count. if you were a regular albanian, you looked down on those poor suckers in kosovo and vice versa. so we decided that albanian was the end of the line. and that everyone needs their albanian--someone to feel superior to.

now, back to the regularly scheduled post. i've been thinking about this because things have gotten a little nuts in the comments on some of the other blogs of late (most recently the blog camp blog last evening--and i can't even blame wine b/c i was drinking tea in my hotel room in oslo since the little tiny bottle of wine in my hotel minibar costs 185NOK ($28) and the two glasses i'd had six hours earlier in the lounge at the airport were no longer having any effect).

you see, we're all stark raving mad. and we found each other here in the blogosphere. and finding other mad people has clearly fed that madness. and i fear that some people (like whoever stopped following blog camp in the middle of the madness last night) found all this talk of corn and rocks and herman and to rad or not to rad (definitely the latter) (and which shall hereafter be referred to (on this blog at least) as the r-word which shall not be named) and pink and all that stuff to be a bit much.

but i'm here to say that we most definitely didn't mean it that way. and so you should ALL feel that you can jump into the fray at any time. like monique (hey, she's new!) did last night on the blog camp blog.  all of this madness might have looked like mobning, but it really sincerely wasn't meant that way. we want everyone to feel welcome in this particular vortex of madness. so please play along if you want to--jump right in and ask what all that silly talk is about if you don't understand. we're really quite harmless. we just like the calming effect of rocks and watching corn grow (not watching corn pop, that's totally not relaxing, or so i've heard) and IM conversations in the comment section. maybe it just makes our comment numbers look good, or maybe we're just a bit crazy. but either way, we're harmless and would love it if you joined in the fun. we're all albanians here. :-)

p.s. none of this comment madness really happened here on MPC, but i feel a bit responsible for it because i'm definitely one of the IM-convo commenters, so that's why i'm posting here. click the links above if you want to see firsthand what i'm talking about. :-)

random thoughts to clear my head, take 3(00)

i love my job, but right now, i'm on input overload, which means it's time for a little deposit of random thoughts to clear my head.

: : would i rather have a bionic arm or a bionic leg?

: : what magical combination of factors happened so that this remote, northern island-y (is that a word?) area that's actually kind of a pain in the ass to get around in has such a high concentration of highly-specialized, really technical people/companies doing super cool innovative stuff?

: : could it be residue of the viking spirit i've been looking for lo these many years?

: : shouldn't someone try to duplicate that in africa?

: : are certain names bitch names? if so, which ones are they? if we knew, could we just avoid people with those names?

: : what IS my superpower?

: : has everyone checked out the hermit book club? because it's gonna be so cool! tho' i do wonder how it's going to involve food...

: : why is paris hilton still alive?

: : i really wish i was home to discuss all of the new theories which are swirling in my head with husband. he's the best theorizer i know. which is just another way in which he is a keeper.

: : i wonder if the gods of blogger do any tracking of the way in which their BoN thing brings people together and how many more blogs it actually sprouts (i can think of three off the top of my head--one, two and three ) and if that's actually their diabolical plan...in which case, cool. i love diabolical plans, don't get me wrong.

: : what might it mean if your regular grocery list includes wasabi peas?

: : what will future innovation look like? some kind of even more matrix-like collaboration between people and companies?

: : what if more CO2 was actually what the planet needed? (i don't necessarily believe this, i'm just half-listening to a debate on global warming on swedish television as i type this.)

: : george stephanopolis is not really as cute anymore as he once was. that makes me think that perhaps i'm also not as cute as i once was...arrgh!

: : that little doggie was so cute last weekend. but i'm a cat person, how can i have such doggie lust? is it because a pug is actually a cat in dog form?

: : and lastly, what about this guy...

have i mentioned that i love my job?

this is what's on my brain this week and why i'm not visiting all of you as much as i would like. instead of my usual late nights of surfing all the blogs i'm folllowing, i've been up late writing. for work! and it makes me so happy! i've had three days in a row of talking to inspiring people and i get to write up their inspiring stories of innovation and dynamic change.

and this place is so beautiful, that i just totally can't believe my luck life.

and today, after a morning of learning and enthusiasm and meeting new people who love what they do and are doing totally amazing, innovative things, i had a bit of time to drive a little ways down the coast and find the most beautiful little beach covered in these:

i can tell you that i am once again grateful that i'm gold, because that  bag isn't gonna be light.

i promise i will be by to visit soon, it's just gonna be a crazy couple of weeks. so please be patient with me!

randomness to clear my head

i'm reading the stern review and trying to digest it. i don't think i can read all 900 pages of it, but even just reading the abstract is taxing enough. in case you don't know what the stern review is, the quick version is that it's a tome on the economics of climate change commissioned by the UK gov't back in 2005 (delivered in 2006) and parts of it are already coming true today (like the bits about the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen). and speaking of taxing, a lot of environmental taxes are suggested in the report. did you know that the UK actually has an Office of Climate Change? i didn't know that, but i think that's pretty cool. in any case, i needed a break, so i thought i'd have a coffee and a blog to clear my head a bit.

* * *

first a random picture of sabin's red converse all stars in the sunset light last evening.

they. totally. make. me. smile.

* * *

and now, a few random things to help clear my head:

: : i have collected 404 word verification words in a pages document (pages is the apple answer to word, by the way). that doesn't take into account all those that are saved in the notes on my iPhone and scibbled on various scraps of paper other places in this house. i'd better get to work on those for balderdash, tho' i've been doing them one at a time of late, so there are a few new ones over there. what disturbs me a little bit is that more and more often they are REAL words these days. i hope they haven't tweaked the algorithm again.

: : i'm making my bullets using two colons, because tara does it that way and i think that's totally cool.

: : yesterday i discovered the coolest online 'zine i've seen yet. it's called discounderworld and you really can read it online and it doesn't even hurt (usually, i have the urge to print online mags), but stacey has really gotten it right. however, if it still hurts you, you can download it FOR FREE in pdf. i have thus far resisted, but that's mostly to save my paper for my monthly blog printings and also because it's so readable onscreen. that's good design, my friends!

: : i have a blog friend named joyce (who i know as ilovejim on flickr) who has a blog called pattern and perspective wherein she chronicles all her fab vintage design finds. i met her on flickr because we are both fans of heather moore's fabulous skinny laminx line. anyway, she meets justjules via my blog and learns that jules lives only 1.5 miles hours (i thought it was miles, but it was hours) away from her (still a good story anyway). how about that for six degrees of separation?

: : i recently stumbled across a blog called turning*turning. i think it's another one i've found through flickr, because mal* was making those cool little fabric hexagons during her commute. she's an art therapist and i will be doing a guest post regarding my beloved studio and what it has meant to me from an art therapeutic standpoint on her blog later today. so do go check it out. and stay awhile to read her stuff--it's good.

: : using my trusty site meter (which was always kinda mysterious to me before and i really only looked at those pretty dots on the map), i found out that the groovy folks at okaygreat picked up moo's thing about my studio and posted about it too. but then, i stayed and looked around and found out that it's a way cool blog/tumblr/design website kinda place, so now it's a regular visit. 

: : i was recently accused of not understanding the struggle that people are going through of late in these times of GEC, especially in the US. and it's true, i probably don't understand fully, especially in light of the results of a facebook quiz i just took which tells me that i have an 88% perfect life. (sigh. and you KNOW how accurate those facebook quizzes are.) but just because i'm not going through it myself, and i'm maybe a little too focused on taking my crocheted stones to the beach, doesn't mean that i can't have sympathy and even empathy for those who are. because i do care. and i hope that everybody will be ok and get through it intact. and not have to sell all their stuff and their soul and their firstborn children on eBay. because that wouldn't be good. i mean think about it, the whole market flooded with a bunch of over-achieving first-borns. not good.

and on that note, i'd better get back to the stern review...catch ya later, lovelies.