iPhone therefore iAm

serenity now

husband took my phone with him this morning. he's sick. he's got a fever. and it apparently affected his brain and he just took the the whole stack of phones that was sitting on the shelf. which included both of his and mine. and it feels like he took my right arm with him. i can't count the number of times i've reached for my phone - to check my calendar, or my email or my words with friends, or to text someone or to check the weather forecast for tomorrow. or most importantly, to take an instagram photo. my whole life is in that phone. i don't know a single phone number. not one. i only know that most of them start with +45, which is our country code. i am totally helpless without my phone. i have officially turned large portions of my brain over to a pretty, shiny piece of technology. and i like it that way!

i mentioned it on facebook and my friends started "liking" the post - like it's somehow funny or fitting that i don't have my phone! arrgh!  this is definitely putting a damper on the week of positivity.

ready for the weekend

husband comes home today! we're ready to see him and hang out with him again, for sure! i've volunteered to pick him up at the airport (and no, it's not ONLY because i want a starbucks grande venti latte).  i really can't wait to hear his stories of places with names like belo horizonte. doesn't a place with a name like that sound just wonderful? (more wonderful than clayton, NC, in any case, which is also where he was.)

i'm also looking forward to seeing the D60 and what pictures he managed to take with it. i don't really know what it thought of being sent out into the world without me and i'm a little sad that it's been to brazil and i have not, but i know it was safe in husband's capable hands. i told him he had to take a few hotel mirror self-portraits, but i'm not sure he did that (for some strange reason, he doesn't always do what i say). it's just that the D60 will expect it.

* * *

husband said the other day that we should go to the states sometime this year. 

my response, "oh yeah, i just got a sale email from KLM and there are super cheap tix to joburg, like under 4000DKK or something like that." 

husband said, "that's not the states."

oops.

* * *

watching all of the leaders arrive at the G20 summit in london it struck me that they're there to talk stimulating the world economy and about the environment and such, but they all pulled up in giant, bulky, beefed up armored gas guzzling big-ass cars and vans and SUVs.  is that really any better than the message sent by those assholes from the carmakers who showed up for their first meetings in their private jets? i also thought that instead of "growth" in the subtitle of the G20 conference, it maybe should have said "sustainability." because we can't sustain the kind of growth we saw. we've only got the one planet, you see.

* * *

this is a screenshot of my flicker view stats. check out the spike when my kitchen was on apartment therapy! i normally have a rather steady amount of  views (between 200-400), but that day it shot clear up to 1854. it helped that the moo people tweeted another of my photos that day. i guess i don't really care about any of this one way or another, but i thought it was pretty funny visually.

* * *

this is the weekend where we attend the wedding party for husband's sister. i'm so excited to see what they thinks of their atelierBB goodies. the party will be at the wonderful gamla kassen in landskrona.  these shots are from another party we attended there early last summer.

* * *

note, i've been on a roll of late and put up a bunch of single entries over on balderdash, be sure to go check them out. they're autobiographical, but there's a couple of pretty funny ones.

* * *

they promise sunshine and up to 15 degrees this weekend, so you won't see much of me here. i hope the weather is fine where you are and your weekend is filled with laughter!

a monday kind of a day

i love this picture. it looks like a creature of some kind. he's got green moss hair on his head and a large eye and some kind of a trunk-like appendage, along with that arm-like branch sticking up. i love the wrinkles under his chin. i don't really know what i'm going to do with him, but he speaks to me somehow. there's some glimmer of something there. it's one of those moments of intuitive inspiration. i don't know what's going to happen with it, but i'm sure that something will. and no, i'm not going off about inspiration again.

* * *

i made sabin and karoline turn the channel to house at 6 p.m., just like i do nearly every weekday. you see, i need my fix of house. he's so deliciously mean. sabin had my laptop in her lap and announced, "i'll just go to you tube and type hannah montana and watch it there." when did the child learn about you tube? i think i've got to keep a better eye on her.

* * *

this morning, we braved THIS traffic (thank goodness i normally fly to my job) to go in and get husband some vaccinations at the only place we knew for sure would have a yellow fever jab available at 9 a.m. on a monday. mom asked me if i had to twitch him or ear him down for the vaccination, like we used to do with the horses, but i don't actually know if that was necessary, because i was running around frantically trying to find an ATM to get some cash to pay for the damn shots because their stupid card machine was broken. and let me tell you, there was no cash machine within a reasonable walking distance in any direction (reminder to self: do not try to find cash in the area of the royal palace, apparently they have no need for cash). finally, it dawned on me that there was an ATM on the 4th floor of my old workplace, right across the street from the doctor and so i asked a good friend who is still on the inside (if that sounds like prison, i do mean it to a little bit) to help me out with some cash. naturally, during this frantic run, i managed to find time to grab not one, but two double lattes. and by the time i got back, not only was husband vaccinated against yellow fever, but also against hepatitis B AND their stupid card machine was back up and running, so they didn't need my hard-earned cash (tho' i am very grateful for irene's help!). it was a monday kind of thing.

and then i set this guy off at the airport so he could head off to north carolina (no yellow fever there) and then onwards to brazil (possibility of yellow fever there). i'm a bit envious of brazil. south america is one of my missing continents (Oz is the other one). then i high-tailed it for home, where the feverish child had been left on her own (with big sis when we left) and where research into these called. so much for being a resourcestærke parent, leaving the child home alone sick. but it was deemed better than dragging around in the car to get carsick at the moment of leaving. i wish we'd all been headed off for brazil. i already had yellow fever. the vaccine. or was it japanese encephalitis? or maybe typhoid fever. i never remember.

in lieu of going to brazil, perhaps i'll just have to watch the movie:

hope your monday was fabulous.

just another mundane monday

turns out i was premature in my being pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the fabric-softener scented washing machine repairman. you see, he fixed only one of the two problems and he left a totally NEW problem behind. which i didn't realize until after i did the first load. and naturally, they can't send someone back 'til thursday. grrr. crappy ass miele repairmen. actually, i have to give meile credit, now that i'm naming them by name, the girls on the customer service phone are great and you get to talk to a live person right away, rather than wading through some kind of automatic system and being directed to bangalore or bangulu as they're calling it now. i guess they just don't have very strict requirements as to whether you, as a washing machine repairman, have actually ever repaired a washing machine or might be capable of doing so.

then, around noon, husband called in a panic and asked me to bring him some clothing suitable for fencing. that took nearly two hours to locate said clothing (in dirty clothes pile since washing machine still not fixed) and drive it to him and get back home. note to self: ask husband more questions about what kind of course it is he's attending anyway....

and then i realized that although it was cloudy and dreary as hell in denmark, the sun was shining in sweden and that just seems unfair on so many levels--they've got nicer cars, more style, lower taxes, all the good names on the ikea stuff (the only stuff with danish names is insignificant stuff like bottle openers and the like) and now this:

after that run, it was time to pick up sabin. she did the absolute sweetest thing and completely restored my faith in humanity (which was waning in the face of extreme lack of sunshine) by filling a bag with all of her heinous bratz dolls and announcing that she wanted to take them to school the next day and give them to her friend aleyna, who is a girl from a turkish family (which somehow makes it even sweeter to me, tho' it shouldn't really matter). how cool is that?

and on top of it, she made a crown for the cat out of pipecleaners. i picture build-a-bear clothing on this cat's horizon:

i did very little that was on my list--my excuse being that the hardware store was out of the good firewood thingies so i couldn't warm up the studio without risking life and limb and of course, husband blowing a two hour hole into my day. and i made chicken for dinner--i found a package in the fridge and felt i had to use it up before it went bad, plus the child is a huge carnivore. but tomorrow is another day and we can be vegetarians then.

happy birthday, darwin!

i didn't realize it 'til today that husband and darwin have the same birthday, but when i think about it, it makes so much sense.

i went to a darwin exhibition today at the natural history museum (zoologisk museum) in copenhagen and here's what i saw:

i totally have a thing about lucy:

and how cool is the ichthyosaur?

and just imagining darwin's travels...

the level of thinking required is mind-blowing
and in my humble opinion,
simply not happening today
(tho' i hope i'm wrong about that)

and sabin got the opportunity to be a mini-scientist.

i know that tangobaby is proud:

more stories of this tomorrow, because there are so many thoughts that were provoked by this exhibition and on this auspicious day--husband's birthday, our 10th anniversary and darwin's 200th birthday. what a day!

living the right life

living the right life. how can we ever really know? we're so in the middle of living our lives, that how can we ever see if it's the right one we're living or not? twelve years ago, i was living the wrong life. only i didn't know it. i was practically a newly-wed when i headed off on my fulbright. why did i go away to an obscure balkan country, leaving my new husband (he was an old boyfriend, so it didn't feel that new) in a new city (we had moved from arizona to chicago)? i thought i did it because it was an academic/professional opportunity that i couldn't pass up. i mean, who turns down a fulbright, especially for a guy? that would just be silly if not downright stupid.

when i was in that balkan backwater, i encountered a lot of lost souls and i silently thanked my lucky stars that i wasn't one of them. because i didn't think i was. i even had a conversation with a friend one evening about how so many of the people around us seemed to be running from something...responsibility, loneliness, boredom, relationships (or lack thereof), a picture of themselves they didn't have to face when there were there outside of their "real" life. i remember that we decided we weren't running from anything. and i meant it at the time. i felt not so much like i was running away as running toward. towards a career that i could see on the horizon and to which a fulbright was an essential component, just like presenting at conferences and scholarly publication.

but, about halfway through my time there, i realized that i was in fact running away from a life that wasn't working. i had gotten married for all of the wrong reasons. it was a combination of a lot of factors...peer pressure--all of our friends were getting married, even the ones who hadn't been together as long as we had. his residency was ending. we'd been together for years. people thought we were a great couple--being with us was like hanging out with paul and jamie from mad about you, only even funnier and wittier and not at all annoying (or so we thought). he was a doctor, so i didn't have to explain what i was doing studying russian literature. he was funny and nice and i liked him. key word being liked. i wasn't in love with him and never had been, but the time was simply right, so we got married.

but i didn't know, or at least didn't admit, any of this, especially not to myself, until i actually had met the person i should have been spending my life with. he too was funny and nice and so cute, but was so much more than that. he challenged me--i remember a heated discussion about postmodernism at a cafe high on the hill in thessaloniki, warm summer breezes wafting in from the aegean, him waving a forkful of cool honeydew melon at me while telling me that postmodernism was just laziness, it wasn't possible that everything was equally good. and in challenging me, he took me seriously in a way that my starter husband never did. he indulged me, but never took me seriously. and in taking me seriously, i realized that j-p respected me. and he made me laugh and do silly things (stealing fries from some friends of ours who were standing in line in bull's (a greek equivalent of mcdonald's) even tho' we didn't even know one another at the time. we immediately started in on the practical jokes together, already then. it was destiny that we would be together. meeting him made me feel like i'd been holding my breath for such a long time and could at last breathe for real. it was the great love that i had stopped believing could exist outside of big-budget hollywood films.

we had to go through a lot to be together. it's one thing to meet one another and fall madly in love when you're both out of your element, away from your everyday life and your everyday responsibilities. but we knew we wanted to try to be together back in the real world as well. we talked openly about how we had each been living the wrong life up to that point and we didn't want to wake up in another twenty years and realize that it was too late to correct it. so we went through the pain of divorces and not having much money and transporting me to a new culture to which i am still at times resistant. but we were always resolved in wanting to have lived the right life and to treasure the great love we had found together.

and today, we've been married for ten years. what a life it's been. i didn't end up the academic i expected to be, but then i would never have traveled the way i have, nor had the experiences i've had career-wise. and today, on our tenth anniversary, i'm completely sure that i'm now living the right life. and we still have the great love that we found in one another back in that balkan backwater. it's deeper and more sure than ever.

we still discuss deep issues like postmodernism and social theory and evolution and the shockingly aphoristic, crap-like quality of business/leadership-related books (even those from harvard university press), if not daily, then every other day. sometimes we have these discussions in bed at night, giggling in the darkness as we elaborate on bourdieu's notion of cultural capital or whether the next steps of evolution are taking us into cyberspace. and these discussions keep us vital and engaged in one another and in the world.

he builds me things, like my beautiful kitchen and my writing house/atelier/studio/building-in-the-garden-that-i-don't-know-what-to-call (so he had the help of a wonderful polish guy named rafy on that one). we have a style together that we've developed over the last decade. it encompasses everything from our home to our cooking to our music collection (admittedly, i influence that rather heavily because i'm the one with iTunes and have banished his 18 supertramp albums to his workshop--didn't they only have the one song, you ask? yes, and they did it over and over on many albums, but i digress). but we have come to a place, after ten years, where we know who we are as us.

although we each have a professional life that is individual, we are definitely living our life together and it feels like the right life, even more so ten years in. and i hope it goes on for several more decades before that plane crash, but today, we will celebrate that first decade.

oh, and it's also husband's birthday. that way he couldn't very well forget our anniversary. clever, eh?

husband, you are my life.