energy leech

i spent the day in the company of an energy leech. you know the type. hyper, never stops talking, never stops offering unsolicited and unwanted opinions, never stops awkward attempts at what's supposed to be flattery, but widely misses the mark. your heart sinks from the moment you realize she's there, wondering why? why? why? and once again being utterly convinced that god must not exist, because if s/he did, s/he would never let this happen. like a black hole, sucking all of the good vibes, energy and positivity out of the room. perhaps that's not fair, because she is weirdly positive, aside from the snide remarks about how you're not taking the right norwegian fish oil and you probably should be (since it's apparently what's making her withstand chemo without feeling a thing (never mind that it probably gave her the cancer in the first place (but i digress. (oops, was that out loud?)))). and in the end, you can no longer see whether that grading is giving things a yellow or green or blue or purple tinge, because she has stolen every last bit of your energy. and did i mention that she never stops talking? and you miss yoga class because the edit runs two hours and fifteen minutes past the scheduled time (did i mention the incessant talking?) and so you stumble onto the street and rush to h&m to get new tights and pony tail holders and stop by sephora to check out rihanna's fenty line of highlighters to console yourself. and you get a golden milk (almond milk + turmeric) to fortify (in lieu of that carcinogenic fish oil), which turns out to be your dinner (by choice). and you wonder if you're too old for such things and if you can bill someone for time you'll never have back.

when grown women act like they're in junior high

you know that moment when someone calls you out of the blue and is angry with you? you get a whole litany of complaints from them, some which are perfectly valid, but they were so off your radar that you’re taken aback by the whole thing? it’s an instant of insight into another perspective; one which you definitely would never have arrived at on your own.

during that phone conversation (which feels strange in and of itself, because honestly, who makes phone calls anymore these days?), you realise that the person actually just wants to be mad and doesn’t want to resolve anything with you. she just wants to communicate her anger. repeatedly and insistently. and she definitely does not want to listen to you, nor does she actually want the information that she claims you have been withholding from her. she mostly seems to want to give you lessons about a culture that you clearly don’t understand, what with your being a foreigner and all. and while it’s all very unpleasant, people are entitled to their emotions. and sometimes situations make us angry. but you’re actually quite zen about it because you have no vested emotions in this person. you’d met her a few times, but actually felt quite ambivalent about her, not disliking, but not liking either. and you chalk the whole thing up to what you have to endure if you’re going to head up a little artsy organisation involving a bunch of women. because women are always worst to one another (why is that?).

however, it doesn’t stop there. the angry person takes to facebook and airs her complaints publicly on the group’s facebook page. you’re traveling for work at the time and don’t have time to address the complaints in the public forum, but thankfully one of the other members does so. a few weeks later, when you try to do so and actually to thank her for motivating the board to start an electronic newsletter to keep members informed, you discover that you are blocked from commenting on the post. and also on another post, which is complaining that the angry woman can’t see the information you posted about an upcoming event. and you realise that the reason she can’t see it, or any of your other posts, is that she has blocked you. and you investigate how one goes about that on facebook and you realise that it’s not something that could have been done by accident – it had to have been intentional. she wanted to spew her complaints and she didn’t want you to be able to answer them. and while that’s normal behaviour on the internet, it’s actually not that often that you encounter it in real life. and you move away from ambivalence towards dislike.

but you try to actually curb your knee-jerk response to such a person and handle it from another, more zen place. so you send an email with the comment that you wanted to post, praising her for sharing her experience with the group and for prompting us to start a tiny letter newsletter. and you say that it’s perfectly ok that she has blocked you on facebook (and you actually mean it), but that she should know that it’s why she can’t see the information you post in the group and could she kindly refrain from publicly complaining about that when she has chosen it herself.

she responds with pleas of a lack of tech savvy and asks you to explain how she can fix it. so you play tech support and give her a detailed description of where/how you block and unblock people (after googling your way to how it's done). and when she stops by the exhibition, you also show her the same on your own computer, which you happen to have along. but you maintain a wary distance and are not warm and friendly, because hello, she did block you and now she’s standing right in front of you, lying to your face about it.

some hours later, you hear that she proceeded to go down to the square and talk shit about you to several of your friends. and with that, you’ve had enough and you write to her once again, kindly asking her to please take the conversation directly with you and not go around talking about you on the streets. and, while lying to you directly that she hadn’t done so, like a child, picking up their toys and going home – she petulantly picks up her paintings from the exhibition and says she is leaving the group. and you wonder how grown women (seriously, she's in her 60s) can behave like that.

maybe we really do learn how to behave when we’re in junior high.

and then your ambivalence returns. and you realise it’s all just fodder for an eventual novel. if people didn’t want you to write about them unfavourably, they should have been nicer.

mass murders and other disappointments

i've been searching for words about the most recent school shooting in oregon. although i do have strong opinions about this topic (get the guns out of the hands of the maniacs and everyone else), there are so many (kristoff, bruni, blow) who have said it better than i. or just look at these sobering gun death statistics that good assembled. or did you know that there have been 994 mass shootings in 1004 days? and there, on a guardian graphic, were the words platte, south dakota and six red bodies to signify 6 lives ended by a mass murderer (who also happened to be their father/husband). what will it take for change to come? how many people have to die over a misinterpretation of the constitution?

* * *

i'm hoping that when my new job begins (october 19, i'm counting down the days), that the daily nightmares i've been having about the jerk who did away with my job in lego will go away. i think they were brought on by seeing him a week or so ago and having him nearly refuse to shake my hand in front of a bunch of people. it apparently weighs heavily on my subconscious, as he's been making nightly rude appearances in my dreams. 

* * *

i'm also looking forward to my new job because it means that i have a good excuse to step down from the increasingly problematic local board i'm on. i've worked hard for more than three years and now our wonderful new library/community space is up and running. i can make all of the things happen there that i am interested in making happen (salon evenings, creative workshops in a creative space, debate evenings, board game evenings, spoken word, pecha kucha, etc.) through the other board i'm on. it seems the one that "governs" the house is falling to pieces. the chair of it has been through a horrible personal crisis and instead of stepping aside, has become a control freak who wants all the credit and doesn't want to do any of the work. another member of questionable graphics talent pushed his idea for a logo through without considering other submitted contributions. and the muttering person who is obviously bitter for having lived the wrong life has decided that it's enough that we serve some stale, donated chips and cheap box wine at the big opening reception this upcoming thursday (this despite that we had a 10,000kr budget for food). i am no longer proud of the work being done by the group, so i will be stepping down from it. and it will be an enormous relief. and i am a bit grateful to them for feeding the characters for my novel.

* * *

and speaking of that muttering deficit person, i noticed today that she had actually had the nerve to switch places in our creative workshop with someone who was on holiday, taking the better spot by the window and the better cupboard for herself. there is a chance she agreed it with that person, but it still seems really underhanded to do it while she was away. how can grown women behave like this?

life lessons :: part 2

ahh, the distraction power of cute baby animals....

how to be småligt:

1. hold a secret meeting.
2. don't send out an agenda beforehand, which would remind people who somehow didn't get it saved in their calendars of the existence of the meeting.
3. don't send out any minutes of the meeting for at least ten days afterwards.
4. get mad at someone who sends a set of suggestions to the whole group because they didn't know anything about decisions made at the secret meeting (or even that there was a secret meeting).
5. hold another meeting (admittedly not secret) with a small minority of the members. make a bunch of decisions without including the contribution submitted in good time before the meeting. 
6. choose a badly-designed, weirdly colored logo for your brand new beautiful house (which belongs to the whole community and not only the small group) without considering other suggestions or even opening it up to the public to contribute and/or choose. (e.g. get the community involved so they feel ownership. heaven forbid.)
7. and odin forbid that any of those clumsy logo suggestions be sent out to all members of the group before the meeting attended by the minority so that everyone can offer a carefully considered opinion.
8. be a control freak for no reason.
9. exclude members of the group for no reason.
10. have a chosen group within the group that makes all of the decisions. preferably in secret, behind everyone's back.
11. especially that girl with the accent.
12. be petty.
13. think small.
14. always try to exclude someone.
15. preferably the person who came up with the idea in the first place, so you can steal all the credit.
16. be a xenophobe whenever possible.
17. don't acknowledge the enormous volunteer contributions made by the various people you're bullying.
18. appear as a character in my novel. and wish to hell you'd been nicer.

*småligt - adj. if petty were on steroids and wearing both underwear and shoes that are too tight. not worldly. with a very limited horizon. non-inclusive. one of those words that's just better in danish.

life lessons

how to be a bitch:

1. float into the room, wafting expensive perfume and dramatically flounce down your easel and art supplies.
2. immediately pounce sarcastically on a small grammar mistake (the equivalent of a/an) made by a non-native speaker of your minor language.
3. hold onto that grammar mistake like a nasty little growling drop-kick dog with an organic designer artisan dog biscuit, pointedly bringing it up again half an hour later.
4. when the person who made the mistake (and who is tired from being up half the night watching the lunar eclipse and on top of it, in the throes of PMS) doesn't laugh, sarcastically ask if she's "too delicate to take a little teasing."
5. ask as well, "do you have trouble with the full moon?" in some knowing way that just seems weird.
6. refer to your husband as your consort (as if you're the queen). 
7. disparage the large, successful international company that has put your podunk little nothing town on the map, complaining about the tourists they attract and how the town is filled with their offices, theme park, school and museums and worst of all their foreigners (gasp!). (not to mention their airport, and the public sculpture they've provided...)
8. don't be able to take it when the absurdity of complaining about that is pointed out with a genuine out loud laugh.
9. deny that you said anything disparaging about said company and fluff up your feathers, preening about how your consort was instrumental in it all, including the airport.
10. launch into some insider story about the airport using a bunch of obscure acronyms and referring to your consort's private plane.
11. get in one last snide shot at the grammar while also disparaging the non-native speaker's husband (who is clearly helpless if he hasn't managed to eat dinner by himself) and whom you have never met. 
12. appear as a character in my novel. and wish to hell you'd been nicer.

* the g&t photo is because i needed one after that encounter.

what is to be done?

somehow, reading this piece on incorporating the maker movement into schools, as a learning/problem-solving tool, makes me wonder if we should have tried harder to make it work with our local school. but we had tried for a whole year and it felt like time was running out. with unresponsive, slippery (i honestly wonder if they're part eel) leadership, that smiles and nods to your face and fills the air with fluffy spindoctor speak and then goes away and does nothing, it felt like such a daunting task, so we gave up and moved sabin to a new school. we are blown away at the difference already and it's only been a little over a week - she's motivated, she sits down and diligently does her homework every evening (and she actually HAS homework every evening) and she comes home talking about what she learned (even stuff about hitler!). she never did that at the old school, not once. getting her to tell something about school was like pulling teeth.

but some part of me thinks that the old school should have had to get their ducks in a row and shape up. they should have been required to perform and even excel. and we should have been proud and happy to be there. they owe it to the community, because little communities like this depend on having smart, motivated people to keep them going. we pay a lot of tax (don't get me started) and i wouldn't mind it if i saw results here within my community. and with a grade point average of 4.7 as opposed to the 7.1 of the school we moved to, it wasn't even a contest. and apparently the local superintendent insists that the school is ambitious and that the scores are exactly where they should be. which is the whole problem. how can, what is arguably a D+ average on a comparable american scale, possibly be deemed ambitious? even the schools which are full of the purportably problem immigrants have much higher scores than that. and these are normal, bright, middle class kids with danish parents (hmm, i wonder if the immigrants are really so bad?) so there's honestly no excuse.

but i still feel very sad about the whole thing, even while i'm sure we made the right decision. the class itself was great - socially, they functioned just fine, everyone had someone to be friends with and there was no serious bullying. the problem was the teachers and even more so leadership that tries again and again to cover up problems and doesn't welcome conversation and dialogue which could lead to solving them. frankly, our little town deserves better. it's too bad that so many of us (as of tuesday this week, 9 will have moved from the class of 26) had to choose to leave instead of continuing the dialogue. our kids deserve better and we simply couldn't wait any longer.

* * *

stupid things hard-core christians say.

hilarious, but also really, really sad.

and possibly more than a little disturbing.