100 happy days :: day 66

somehow with this happiness project, happiness has become something visual. and as i look back on a day that was rather busy and hectic and rainy and grey and dark, i don't really have any visual happinesses to reflect upon. maybe the beech leaves, which are springing out in their special, brilliant light green shade, but it was getting too dark and too rainy to snap a photo of them as i drove hurriedly home, chinese takeout cooling in the back seat. these moments of happiness have largely been something i wanted to preserve in photos, but maybe happiness at times is just an overall grateful feeling. gratefulness for laughter at work and good conversations and good collaborations. and did i mention laughter? and moments in the car, having a talk with my child, since she wasn't glued to her iPhone, due to it having been sent in for repairs and having been given a lame old samsung that couldn't even download facebook messenger (oh the horror), leaving her left with only talking to me to entertain herself. and that talk ranged over various pronunciations of words and accents and the vast differences in danish, despite this place being about the size of wisconsin. and how her pronunciations and accent are a large part of her identity - she was born in copenhagen and clings to her sjælland accent. i can't say i blame her. how we speak and sound does play a large part in our identity and in how the world sees us. and that conversation was definitely a happy moment in the midst of today. it's there, in the middle of everyday life, that the happiness really happens. sometimes you just have to stop and think about it.

netizen vs. real life

i feel i've drifted away from my former life as a solid netizen, to one that's more present in my real world surroundings. i'm more involved in my local community, i do more activities in my area, rather than just partaking of them online. in general, i find myself living a life that's less isolated, more grounded in my surroundings and far more properly dressed than it was. and i'm spending a whole lot less time online. i think it's made me less in touch with the culture of the blogosphere than i was, but perhaps i just feel less of that culture than i did.

but that culture is also changing. ironically, there are more blogs than ever, but i think people read them less. we read in a different way than we did just a couple of years ago. we read on devices, on the go, rather than sitting in front of our laptops. this means we leave less comments. as much as i adore my iPhone and iPad, i'm not THAT fond of typing anything of any substance on them (and odin knows that all of my comments are full of substance). we might ponder just as much an interesting post we've read, but we don't necessarily let the writer know that we were there. and it might not even show that we were, thanks to various readers and such.

i think blogging has changed, even for me. i'm less driven to share every thought (which largely has to do with the aforementioned, undoubtedly). but it's also because i share those snippets i once shared here in other ways (e.g. on facebook and instagram and less so, via twitter). and all of the pretty things i find, i pin now on pinterest instead of linking and pondering here (come to think of that, i kind of miss the old way - pinterest is actually rather impersonal in many ways).

flickr (with which i've always had a love-hate relationship) is largely over for me as a social network. i don't even bother to add my photos to groups anymore (i'm not even really sure when it stopped). it's really just a place in the cloud to park and categorize my photos and a place from which to retrieve my instagram photos for blog posts without actually plugging my phone into iPhoto (tho' that may be solved by iOS6, i've yet to fully explore it, but i've heard there's now iPhoto on the phone).

i guess what i mean by all of this is that i've moved back towards flesh & blood real life. and i think i miss the matrix a little bit, even as i am slightly relieved to be more present where i am here and now.

how do you think the blogosphere has changed in recent years?

reflections on november

i know we're 4 days into december, but i've been behind now for about two weeks, so why should it change now? looking back on november, i don't remember three days with sunshine, so i'm a little surprised to find them here among my november daily photos. tho' two of those days, it's quite obscured by fog. other than that, it appears we horsed around quite a lot and still enjoyed our baby bunnies, tho' they're growing up too fast!

it's funny, these pictures show a lot, but they also leave a lot out. they leave out that i've been teaching english and getting more involved in my local area and working on my book. i've been planning a new business (or a new and improved version of an old one). i've made dinner regularly and done laundry and vacuumed and watched good and bad television and listened to good radio. i've felt under the weather and i've despaired of the grey days. i hibernated a little bit. i fed the animals and talked to them quite a lot. and i made stuff. and in it all, i guess i survived another grey, long november in denmark.

11022011

somehow, those days with significant numbers (even if it's only a palindrome if you're american) seem like they should be especially significant, but today was just an ordinary day. the child wasn't feeling well, so we spent the morning making yarn pompons, drinking tea and playing with the baby bunnies. i did a bit of work, made some eggs and bacon (we suddenly have a lot of eggs) and then we went to see how the horse is doing. she's no longer lame, but sabin has two more weeks off from riding due to her broken finger. it got foggy on our way home. very foggy. and that was it. an ordinary day, despite the extra-ordinariness of the numbers of the date. but perhaps life is lived on the ordinary days.

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it's been awhile since i had a blog crush, but yesterday, i spent a long time reading quite a lot of posts on spilling ink.  and i had that feeling of finding a real kindred soul.  check it out, i hope you'll enjoy it too.

archaeologists of the everyday

each day, as millions of bloggers sit down to compose the day's post, we dig into our experiences and often, our photo libraries. why do we do it? out of a desire to share? to connect with others? to show off? to get something off our chests? to keep those nigglings of insanity at bay? to construct an album of a life? an everyday life?  russian has a word for that everyday life - byt' - which somehow carries more meaning - it captures something of the underlying sorrow of the quotidian sameness of the everyday. and also the kitsch that it contains. and the poshlust - which nabokov called "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity." because there is some kind of narcissistic self-satisfaction in all of this blogging and all of the pretty pictures shared on flickr.

we are such a NOW kind of culture - i say as if there is but one culture. but i guess i mean the culture of the interwebs. we want to share things as they happen - works in progress, often unfinished. we can hardly wait to share. me, i seldom use photos that are more than a couple of days old - i have a need for the documentation to be of now. we do 365 photo projects, where we document every day. and while i'm grateful for the project, as a repository of my memories, there isn't something worth documenting every day. some days, it's just a box of vegetables from the garden or some walnut (or pecan) honey. because not every day is filled with exciting events. these traces we leave of our everyday...what do they mean? and what will they mean to future analysts? are they worth analyzing at all? or are they just byt' in all its glory.  what, if anything, is all of this doing to art and literature?

heavy questions for a friday. but i'm grateful to dubravka ugresic's museum of unconditional surrender for getting me thinking again. (and sorry that i can't seem to produce the right diacritics on my keyboard to spell her name correctly.)

everyday aesthetics

if you visit me over at domestic sensualists, you've heard me going on and on about bread of late. i've rather successfully made a sourdough starter and have even perfected a very good danish rye bread. husband says i've officially been assimilated. so as i wandered the flea market on saturday, i had my eye out for a new container for my sourdough starter - one that looks a bit more fetching on the countertop than the tupperware it was residing in. as you can see, i found a lovely bit of crockery from the 70s with a lid. it's perfect for my sourdough starter.

in looking for this, i got to thinking about everyday aesthetics. and how important they are. maybe they've become more important to me after living for more than a decade in denmark, where everything is over-designed down to its essentials, from chairs to lamps to vases and even those mobiles you hang over a baby. we've even got a bodum cheese cutter that is ergonomically designed. hmmm, perhaps i have been assimilated.

maybe it's more important to me these days because the house is otherwise such a pit of despair (that's visible in several details in the photo above - wallpaper, countertop, grey list around the edge of the counter top that's shoddily cut). i've felt much better in the horrible pink kitchen (why haven't i painted that again?) since husband built me a new gas stovetop (thank you, ikea), but it's at least partially because i always use the good bowls when i'm cooking. if the food going in is good and the bowls and utensils you use make you happy when you see them, it's overall a more satisfying experience. and where did we get the notion that we have to save certain things for "best" or at least for a special occasion? why not enjoy them everyday?

anyway, this is why i wanted to have a better container for my sourdough starter. i just didn't like looking at that plastic tupperware on the counter next to my kitchen-aid on a daily basis.

why don't you get out the good dishes and silverware tonight? it will lift your mood while you're cooking and i'll bet your family will thank you.