monday will sometimes bite you in the ass

it's a balmy 8°C (46°F) outside and foggy. the winds from last week's storm (the increasingly aptly-named bodil), have finally subsided and it's so still you can hear water dripping from the trees. in many ways, it's a really beautiful day, despite it being grey. but it's also a monday and sometimes monday just bites you in the ass.

it actually started already when i woke up with a start, far too early, thinking of a group of friends i had 25 years ago in california. they were a shallow lot and hadn't crossed my mind in years. it wasn't a nice way to wake up. so, as i am wont to do, i grabbed the iPad and checked in to see what was happening in the world of facebook. near the top of my feed was a local friend, expressing delight that she could hear her elementary-age children in the other room, getting into their stockings for their advent calendar presents, and exclaiming "shit and fuck" with delight over their gifts. it made her feel like she'd really picked the right presents. yes, these swear words coming from the mouths of kindergarten and second graders, were words of joy and christmas cheer. and their mother was proud.

after all these years, i do realize that our english swear words, while in widespread use in denmark, do not carry the same meaning or impact that they do in english. and i freely use them, even the f-word, myself. however, i never get used to them coming from the mouths of babes. i just really think that's not cool. and it still causes an almost literal jolt of culture shock when i hear (or in this case, read) it.  i commented on the post that where i grew up, if i'd reacted to my christmas gifts with swearing, i'd have had my mouth washed out with soap. one of the others commenting on the post responded that there was nothing about swearing. she didn't even recognize shit and fuck as swear words. i knew then it was going to be that kind of day.

soon after that, my child began texting me, plaguing me to let her get the office package for her macbook air. yes, my child, requesting to put a microsoft product on a mac. she may as well have asked for a ferrari with a ford engine. it made me realize i've utterly failed as a parent. so, determined to end it all, i headed down to the lake. only to find that the tree from which i had planned to hang myself had toppled in the storm. trees around here just give up so easily.

ok, i wasn't really going to kill myself, that was just for dramatic and humorous effect.

soon it was time to go pick up the child from school. she and her friends got in the car and began talking in a sort of pidgin danglish and it was driving me completely mad. i was so not in the mood for it. it was like when someone keeps repeating what you say and you want them to stop and they won't. i had that same panicky feeling that comes from that. like it might never stop and you will probably have to stab someone before it's all over. and then there will be a mess and the explaining to the parents...

but then the phone rang, it was a neighbor, telling me that our horses were out and running around in the fog on the road. so we rushed home. the girls jumped out of the car (thereby ending the danglish madness) and grabbed them and started walking them home. and yes, they were just hanging out on the road. silly horses. then some maniac drove by at high speed and the two they had hold of got away again and the chase was on. and do you think that asshole took a look in her rearview mirror at the chaos she had wrought? no, she did not. but i grabbed a bucket of grain and a couple of leadropes and we got them in. they were all snorty and excited after their adventures.

i kind of just want to crawl in bed and have this day end. but i guess some days are like that. especially mondays.

on expatriation and culture and landing in the mid-atlantic

some of the projects we have in the pipeline have me thinking about how shaped by culture, one's own and the one in which one finds oneself, we are. defined. how it locks us in boxes and leaves us feeling superior (or inferior) because of it. and how mind-numbingly LIMITING that all is...on both sides.

i stumbled across a blog written by an american who made the move to sweden. it's on sweden.se, a cool site that the swedish institute runs in english - all about living in sweden (wish denmark would have had such a thing back when the internet was in its infancy and i moved here). it got me thinking about all those things that i thought were so alien when i first moved to denmark. some of them still puzzle me, but i've actually gotten used to a lot in the 14-ish years i've been here.

~ i remember my first time in a grocery store, scrambling as i realized there was no one there to pack my groceries and not only did i have to do it myself, i had to PAY for the bag to put it in!

~ when i arrived in denmark in the late 90s, mobile phones were still rather a luxury item in the us - mostly doctors and other important people had them, people with their own cars. i remember being shocked to see people on the bus talking on their mobile phone. if you could afford a phone, what on earth were you doing on public transportation? (i had a lot to learn, both about public transportation and about mobile phones.)

~ the sight of a man in a suit, riding a bicycle and smoking a cigarette. in my mind, a bicycle was for exercise, not necessary transport, and who would smoke or wear a suit while exercising?

~ people treating cemeteries as parks, laying out in their bra and underwear in the first rays of spring sunshine on a towel with their bike leaned up against h.c. andersen's grave, catching some rays and drinking a beer.

~ public nudity. this one was technically in sweden, but as the ferry pulled into landskrona, there was a row of colorful little houses along the waterfront and a bunch of naked swedes were jumping in and out of the water from the doorways of the little bathing houses.

~ no one ever holding a door open for you if you were coming along behind them. it got so bad, i thought that they were actually waiting to strategically drop it in my face for the most profound rudeness effect. later, i realized that many danes, if they didn't meet you when they went to kindergarten with you, actually lack the ability to see you at all. it's kind of a like you're wearing an invisibility cloak.  this is one of those things i never get used to, it still surprises me and sometimes even hurts my feelings - i just can't help it.

~ signs with the word "fart" on them. in an elevator: i fart. along the roadside: fart kontrol. i thought the danes were obsessed with flatulence and i thought they were pretty darn organized to think they could control it. but it turned out to mean motion or speed - so the elevator was in motion when the i fart sign was lit. and the fart kontrol was a friendly warning that a cop (or just an unmanned van or camera) with radar was just ahead, so you'd better stop driving like a maniac.

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speaking of expats in denmark, i made a new blog friend!

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and speaking of denmark.
film is a powerful medium.

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you have to see what kit lane made of the lila hairball we gave her.
utterly fabulous.

some fun links and video entertainment

scandinavia takes britain by storm
mostly thanks to forbrydelsen - the killing - so i give you a little lesson in danish:



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"Now what I am calling Gaga here certainly derives from Lady Gaga and has everything to do with Lady Gaga but is not limited to Lady Gaga."

there's more where that came from.

so nice to know that postmodernism is still alive and well in the academy.

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a very catchy song about dumb ways to die.

it will be going through your head the rest of the day.

in a good way.

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the i boards on pinterest: i made this, informative infographics, inspiration (this is one of the early boards, i've since divided it extensively and safe this only for stuff i really think i'd make), installations.

danish words for things

these amanitas are a favorite of the danes - they feature heavily in danish christmas decor - on packages, in flower arrangements, on christmas paper, on christmas trees in lovely hand-blown glass versions. leave it to the danes to love a poisonous mushroom. oddly, this predilection got me thinking about danish ways of expressing certain concepts.

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the danish word for superstition is overtro literally "overbelief."  i was once part of a cross-cultural training that got me thinking (here she goes again) about the the way in which culture pervades language. one of the participants asked about chinese superstitions and emphasized the word with a bit of an eye roll, indicating disdain. i haven't run across many superstitions in denmark - in all, it's a pragmatic people with a pragmatic language.

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danish has a marvelous way of expressing whether people have extra energy or not - overskudsmennesker and underskudsmennesker - "surplus people" or "deficit people" if i translate literally. we all know people that fit both descriptions, so it's very apt to have a word to describe it. my partner and i did a book translation and we found english very poor indeed to describe this phenomenon.

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the danish word for immigrant - indvandrer - has become a bit of a swear word in the decade plus i've been here (all over europe and the world nationalistic, quasi-tribal attitudes have arisen and denmark is no exception with the popularity of a right wing "keep denmark for the danes" sort of party). but i actually rather like the word in and of itself. if i literally translate it, "one who wanders in." now that's a concept to which i can relate. if you are an indvandrer, you are also, by definition an udlænding - "one who is from the land out there." i think the way these words are constructed says a lot about the danish attitude towards foreigners. and when it comes down to it, the danes would actually prefer that you wander on back to the land out there. lucky for me, i don't scare easily.

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i'm sure english has weird words for stuff, but none come to mind as i write this. i think it's first outside your own language that you really begin to notice things.

the conventions of politeness

my child has a bad habit of never saying "please." it's not that she doesn't ask nicely otherwise, it's just that the word "please" is never included without prompting. this has been bugging the hell out of me of late. in some sense, she comes by it honestly, because danish has no word for please. there are nice ways of asking for things, but no one word that just means "please." mostly, danish uses a kind of distancing technique to ease the blow of what's being asked for. "would you be so friendly as to let me off the bus" (not that anyone would ever say that particular phrase, they just fidget at your side until you get the hell out of their way.) "pray, hand me the remote," "i would like to ask for a cheeseburger." "are you so sweet as to get me another martini?" and the like.  but "please" as a word and even as a concept is curiously absent.

and naturally, this got me thinking about other linguistic politenesses. like "bless you" when someone sneezes. i remember my mom saying when i was a kid that "bless you" was a holdover from a time when people thought you sneezed out your soul, so you needed to be blessed for it go back into place after a sneeze. mom thought that was quite a ridiculous notion, as our souls could not possibly leave our bodies in that way. so we didn't say "bless you" in our family. as a result, i always felt rather awkward when someone blessed me when i sneezed - i never really knew how to react. do you say "thank you," or express some sort of relief that you still have your soul? i never really knew. let's face it, no one really believes that you're sneezing out your soul, it's today a matter of simple linguistic convention/politeness. so really, why is it that we feel a need to acknowledge when someone sneezes? we don't do it when they burp or fart. aren't bodily functions in general best left uncommented?

another politeness convention that i don't get is the notion of telling someone hello through another person. this is one that there is a word for in danish - at hilse. when signing off a phone conversation or parting from a friend, they will often say, "hils familien" - "tell your family hello." and like with "bless you," i never really know what to do with that. i end up mumbling some awkward, "please tell YOUR family hello." but really, why on earth should they do that? if i want to greet them, i'll do that myself. and if they want to greet my people, they can do it themselves. plus, there's the whole fact that i don't do it. i don't pass along their greetings. it's too awkward and frankly, my family doesn't mind. they think nothing of not being helloed by whoever i talked to on the phone that day.

what weird linguistic conventions of politeness puzzle you?

standing apart from the crowd

the coolest new zealander i know, stacey (remember discounderworld and shoe per diem - those are her brainchildren), has a new blog to go with her new job and already she's making me think. this morning, i read her post on the word entrepreneur and found myself nodding.  as you know, i often ponder language,  and stacey's thoughts on entrepreneur not really being the right word for someone who is starting a little business had actually occurred to me of late.

entrepreneur seems to be a whole lot bigger than small business owner. and while i admire anyone who has their own little company, whether they be a plumber or electrician or specialize in communications in english, there is somehow a difference between daring to go out on your own with a small business and true entrepreneurship. i find entrepreneur as word laden with the notion of a unique invention or The Next Big Thing. i find it interesting stacey also associates it with time and how you as an entrepreneur build up your business in order to spend less time at it, so you can move on to the next thing. i would actually call that investment, rather than entrepreneurship, but i find the thought interesting.

in danish, there is another word for entrepreneur - iværksætter. literally - one who sets work in motion - i like that, as it feels to me like it applies better to the business i'm setting in motion. we've not invented a smart new wheel or the answer to twitter or a truly good battery for storing wind power (whoever invents that will be rich) - we're providing high quality communication services in english for other iværksætter in denmark, who want to grow their businesses globally. and iværksætter seems like the perfect word for it. i guess that's the advantage of living in two languages, you can take the best words from both to express what you would really like to express.

it strikes me as i think about entrepreneurship and read advice about it (and there's a LOT of advice out there), that it's all glowingly positive, evangelistic and rather cheerleader-y. i'm slightly disappointed that no one really talks about all of the fear and night terrors associated with it. because while it's exciting, it's also a tremendous amount of pressure to place on yourself - because the success or failure is all on you - there's no one to blame. and whether or not you get a new kitchen anytime in the near future may be resting entirely on you. 

don't trip on the baggage

"the world is, after all, an endless battle of contrasting memories." - murakami, 1Q84

i'm grateful for the thoughts you shared on my language post last week. both in the comments and via email. the post was some initial thinking about some situations i've found myself in of late and all of your ideas have helped me sort out a bit further what i'm feeling about this issue. it is to an extent, as jessica suggested, a question of whether you feel you belong or not. and the ever-present (if you're me), resistance to belonging fully.

in one of the settings, i've made an active decision not to belong anymore and tonight will be the last time i put myself through what has become a nearly painful evening. the decision to withdraw from that group has more to do with pony abuse, tho' it's also connected to language abuse, than with not feeling like myself. mostly, i think tho', it's a clash of values - or perhaps culture. in my model of the world, it matters more to do all you can than to righteously follow arbitrary rules. i also value good arguments and "that's how we've always done it" is simply not a good argument. once i've lost respect for a person or a group, it's over for me. quite probably my own shortcoming, but nonetheless true. i just hope that i can hold my tongue tonight.

with the other group, i hold back because i'm new and i'm getting the lay of the land. i can also see that my purpose for being involved is different than what the group is currently preoccupied with. but i think it will be ok, as there's room for both my purpose and their preoccupations. but i definitely do hold myself back because it's all in danish in a way that i wouldn't if i could speak english in that context. however, that's not all bad.  it's a good lesson for me to learn. and a bit like taking your husband's last name when you get married, it's a way of starting with a fresh, clean slate. and life doesn't present us with that many chances to do that.

but back to language and the way it constructs us. how we articulate, the words we choose, the history and weight behind those words (both our own and linguistically) - it all matters. we use language to include and to exclude - think of the way doctors speak so that patients can't understand or how when you join a new company and don't yet know all of the acronyms - language is both a way of marking who belongs and perhaps more importantly, who doesn't.

but things do get interesting when the intersections of language involve other languages and other histories and other memories and other baggage. or maybe i'm just preoccupied with all of this because reading murakami makes me even more introspective than usual.

do you recognize yourself in a language not your own?

i've been thinking a lot lately about whether you can ever truly be yourself in a language not your own.  are you recognizable as yourself? and to yourself? i've had occasion to feel that i wasn't myself several times of late in danish. and yet, i can also have moments of feeling comfortable in danish and feeling like my sparkling self. but i wonder if i will ever truly feel like me in danish.

so i asked husband about this, especially since he has spoken exclusively english with me for going on 15 years now and we will never switch to danish (it feeling most unnatural to both of us). i asked him if he ever felt something was missing. he said it was the cultural references, especially those of childhood -  books, films, television programs - that he felt most acutely.  but he said it never made him feel like he wasn't himself, just that he didn't have the full breadth of expression that would be at his disposal in danish.

i actually at times feel like a different person - one who is quieter, who holds back when she would normally say something, who thinks more before she speaks (admittedly not a bad thing), one who sometimes sounds sharper than i mean to because i get something slightly wrong (tho' i'm sure there are those who would argue that i am at times sharper than i should be in english). it's partially that different words and grammar express things differently, it's partially intonation, and i guess it's also a feeling of awkwardness. maybe i'm simply never truly comfortable in danish, so i can't fully relax.

i know some of you live outside your native language too...do you ever feel this way? do you lose a bit of who you are when you're speaking a foreign tongue?

thinking about language

i just read a really interesting piece in the new york times on language. it's from the magazine, so it's a long, deep article (yes, there ARE still some bright spots on the american media landscape).  it discusses gender in various languages and also how different languages express concepts like time (chinese doesn't have verb tenses, for example, so everything happens in the infinitive) and space (an aboriginal language that expresses all directions using north-south-east-west) and a really interesting study on the correlation between how color is expressed in certain languages and how it affects ability to see the color spectrum) i won't recount all of it here, but encourage you to go and read it.

but reading it was well-timed, as i was just telling husband that i just couldn't get used to the way that danish refers to animals as "it," and doesn't use she/he pronouns for them. so, when i'm talking to someone, say the vet or the horseshoer, they refer to our matilde as "it." and it never ceases to be a rather jarring experience for me, because our matilde is a girl and should be called "she" when we refer to her using a pronoun. i feel it as cold and heartless. but interestingly, in danish, to refer to a person as she or he in their presence, rather than using their name, is considered rude. whereas that's perfectly polite in english. i wonder what matilde makes of being called "it?"

only in denmark

i was just watching the new digital channel for children with sabin and they showed this video. it's a puppet who, after a hard day at the office, likes to wear women's underwear. it then comes out that his colleagues all do the same. this could never happen in the US without everyone on the channel being hauled away to the electric chair. but i could not stop laughing. and i simply had to share. don't ever say the danes don't have a healthy sense of humor.

i give you gepetto news: undertøj

lost in translation

line up your dogs, please.

but i wasn't climping the boat, sir, really i wasn't.

VisitDenmark anyone?

ok, sometimes, denmark really makes me laugh. the sense of humor and the creativity among advertising people in this country is astounding. take this case, of a danish tourism video released by VisitDenmark which was recently pulled from you tube (but not before it had 800,000 hits) on the grounds that it promoted promiscuity. i got it (via twitter) from the BBC website. and it really made me laugh. i really wonder who thought this would sell people on the notion of visiting this little country...



and it has spawned some seriously hilarious creative video responses. this one from the perspective of "august," the baby in the video who is all grown up 25 years later.



this is seriously funny stuff. and there's way more on you tube.

what the plants learned at school

today, as you can see, i haven't spent much time here...

that's because the weather has been beyond glorious outside, so i was called out into the garden by birds singing and sabin's cheerful voice and husband asking me exactly where i wanted that new purple rhododendron planted. so i came in the house only to make a big pitcher of fresh lemonade and then to make dinner late in the day. but we ate it outside. and now although it's nearly dark out, we've lit candles all over the garden and will stay out until we can't stay out there anymore. but first, i had to sneak in and share a bit of the gorgeousness with all of you...

in danish, a nursery--as in the kind for plants--is called a planteskole. i love that name, because it makes me think that the plants go there to learn how to behave when they come home to your garden.

and here's a bit of what the plants learned at school...

and then, after dinner, we ate our fill of these...the first of the local strawberries. with sugar and cream.

it would have been a fitting end to a wonderful weekend, but tomorrow's a holiday, so it's not over yet!

note: these photos are just as they came out of the camera. no retouching, no turning up the colors. they've never been near photoshop or lightroom and i didn't even do the little snazzy iPhoto enhance magic wand. nikons are just that good at color.

how i spent kristihimmelfart

kristihimmelfart has something to do with easter. it's ascension (ascention?) day. or whatever. i don't really know what it means. i wasn't really paying attention that time i got sent to bible school for a week when i was 4. i think it's a funny name but that's because i'm kinda simple when it comes to it and it involves the word fart. i wasn't around anyone named kristi today, so i don't know about the farts, but i do know about frogs. because i spent quite a long time trying to photograph frogs. they were singing like crazy before i went down with the camera. do you think they would continue when i got there? of course they wouldn't, so i never did catch them with their little cheeks all puffed out. and i had a little staring contest with one (which i lost, undoubtedly because i don't think they can blink). but it was green and glorious and wonderful to be outside. i'll be able to sit down to work tomorrow, totally refreshed and renewed because i was able to spend most of this glorious day outside.

i also found out something about husband today. he actually has a blog. he created it, but has never written anything on it. and to think i thought he thought we were all completely mad. 5 ants are more than 4 elephants. he's super clever, don't you love that title?  husband is such a keeper. i'm not sure he's really going to blog, but i followed him, just in case. i think i've already been following him for rather a long time, but now it's official.