ten glorious days off stretch ahead

...and man do i need them. and i also really need an old-fashioned blog post, where i just sit down to write and see what comes out my fingers. because that's the best way to make sense of it all. and much of it doesn't make sense. weird decisions, or lack thereof. good people being fired for crappy/nonexistent/unbelievable reasons. colleagues behaving badly. or strangely, or out of character, no doubt because they see their bonuses slipping away in a changed economy. people being asked to take on more work. way more work. like a whole additional job within a job. and no additional pay. and no appreciation or understanding for how much work it is. people going down with stress. because no wonder. 

sometimes i wonder if we're all still behaving like we're in kindergarten because that's where we all learned how to behave? i have more thoughts, but they're not coming out my fingers. hopefully they will over the next few days. maybe a g&t the size of my head will help. 

we made it this far

what a weird week. already on tuesday, it felt pretty long, though in honor of the auspicious date, i was determined to look at everything from a positive perspective. then wednesday came along and it only got longer. it wasn't a great day. i got a reminder that when you switch jobs, you will be surprised and maybe even blindsided and you will have to adjust to the new situation. i also sent a silent prayer of apology to anyone from an agency that i had worked with and who i hadn't treated very well. i'm so sorry! but then i picked up the positivity again and reminded myself how much of a difference i could make if i looked at it from a different perspective. 

that's what changing jobs was about - learning new things, stretching myself, thinking in new ways, doing things from a different perspective. and that's what wednesday gave me, so i can't really complain.

and then on wednesday evening, i went to an amazing event in a small castle turned school that's in the area. i heard very interesting, experimental music from two up and coming young artists - one who performed in the beautiful setting of a church from the middle ages and the other, which was accompanied by a most amazing set of synesthetic visuals. and an established artist, teitur, whom i didn't know before that day. he's from the faroe islands and his songs all tell a story and he performed at a grand piano in an amazing room of the castle and was so authentic and down-to-earth and lovely and genuinely talented and it was bliss. seriously, look for him on spotify and definitely listen to the song called clara. he told the story behind it and it was lovely, but you'll get it even without the story. it's a song of our times.

for most of the day on thursday, i thought it was friday. alas, it was not and that was a disappointment. world war 3 started, for no reason that anyone can discern, other than that putin has gone completely mad. i'm certain he has issues at home that no one knows about. and i think the only way to stop him will be for the west to freeze all his bank accounts, take his yacht and his house(s) on the french rivera. make it hurt. but i fear many innocent ukrainian citizens will be hurt before it works.

and now it's friday. and we made it. and the weekend is ahead. and despite learning that an old colleague is unexpectedly a trumpanzee, and world war 3 has begun, and gas prices are skyrocketing, we will go on. and i will get up and go for a long walk and then i'll settle in to work. and maybe do a bit of sewing and or weaving. and probably feel like crap about the lot of it, because of the aforementioned ww3. what can we do? if i knew, i'd do it.

so many things to ponder

whoa, it's been awhile. things have been busy. it's been a pretty intense period and there's no end in sight. i've been trying to take creative breaks - a lovely weekend away with my creative group, the yearly trip with my weaving group, going to weaving, going to a gourmet knitting day, a pampering event with a friend (think facial and foot bath), followed by an art show and a really nice lunch, several work trips to copenhagen - but it has all left little time to think about personal writing. i miss the way this space allowed me to process things and it would be nice to get back into the habit. odin knows there's plenty to process.

today, as i made dinner - a roast chicken, jerusalem artichokes freshly dug from the garden and some roasted beets, plus a salad with avocado, mango and tomato - i found myself pondering topics to write in the way that i used to and it made me think it would be nice to be back here again. 

things that crossed my mind...the need that everyone seems to have acquired to have a diagnosis, the latest james bond, growing older, the individual nature of grief, what lumke would have wanted to be could she have chosen anything, how to best talk about kitchens from a warm, sympathetic perspective, the natural order of adjectives (thanks, molly), an obsession with growing things from seeds extracted in the kitchen (see the mango plant above, which i started myself), old friends i got to see again this week, sharing what i love about copenhagen, our upcoming trip to arizona (i SO need a holiday), tomorrow's make-your-own-ravioli dinner with friends, what tattoo to get next (i'm thinking a cactus), the chestnut man on netflix. so many things to ponder and write about.  

i think i need to start blogging again like it's 2010 and no one is reading. because, after all, it always came back to me. and it's extremely likely that no one is reading.

* * *

wow, what a story that was released on the day of the seafarer a few months ago (yes, i started this post awhile ago). tales of politics, containers, big tobacco, cancer and whitewashed company histories. i worked for maersk for 5 years and never even heard a whisper of this - only that sealand represented the great maersk move towards containerization. that and the banana plantation that they bought somewhere in africa to push containerization of bananas, which were hauled on refrigerated bulk carriers before containers came along. 

* * *

a national geographic piece on adult fans of lego that, if you ask me, doesn't give enough credit to the actual fans themselves. 

* * *

best ad for wearing a bike helmet ever. the danes are just so good at these things.

* * *

fantastic cooperation between marina abramovic and wetransfer.

first steps towards danish citizenship

when the spray-tanned one became president, i vowed that i'd seek danish citizenship. as he sank lower and lower, i wondered what i was waiting for. i'm not sure what made me finally do it, but last autumn, i signed up (and paid some hefty fees) to take the danish citizenship test and the danish language test that i need to pass for citizenship. back when i got my permanent residence, you got it after 3 years and there were no tests involved. but times have changed. and that's fair. if you want to be a citizen, you should speak the language. and you should know the history and culture of the country. and it's perfectly understandable that you should have to prove it.

i took the citizenship test a couple of weeks ago and have officially passed it. this week, i took the written danish test and on monday, i'll do the oral exam. i'm reasonably certain that i did well on the written part and i'm ready for the exam on monday. i have to prepare a whopping 1 minute monologue and also answer some questions from the examiners. i can do both.

but these tests are only the beginning. after i have the results, i'll have to file my formal application and then wait for maybe two years while my case is handled and my eventual second citizenship is written into danish law. because that's how they do it - it becomes a law.

and in these times, i've been thinking a lot about what a privilege it is, to have a citizenship that affords me a sought-after passport and voting rights, which i exercise to this day. and to be in a situation where i can seek a second citizenship in a country that's also a desirable citizenship - where there's a safety net and national health care and free education and where being a citizen gives you the ability to easily work anywhere in the european union. and when so many people are persecuted and stateless and have so many fewer privileges than i do, it somehow feels like a luxury that's unfair. and it surely has to do with the color of my skin. an unaccountable privilege, one i didn't ask for. but, if i'm honest, one i wouldn't trade away easily either. and so i'm jumping through the hoops, taking the tests, and doing my best to fulfill the requirements to acquire a second passport. and most importantly, voting rights where i live. right now, i have taxation without representation, and feeling not so good about that, after all, is a product of the citizenship i hold now - and will continue to hold, as denmark no longer makes you give it up.

but thoughts about fairness and privilege are on my mind as i go through this process. and i honestly don't know what i think, or where i stand, or what to do about it - to make it easier for others who might not have the privileges i do. i feel these are turbulent times, but also i see so many signs of hope. i honestly don't know what i can do to help, other than do my best to read and understand and learn and try to do better. i think voting is an important part of that, and i think our individual votes count. and i guess that's why i'm seeking danish citizenship.

a fresh start

i spent most of july on a freight ferry. now, i've been on freight ferries before, usually with a film crew in tow, but this time was different. this time, i was a member of the crew. lowest on the totem pole - but i finally got that elusive title that i'd never had - stewardess. or the very elevated "ship owner's assistant," that they tried to upgrade the title to at some point along the way. but that doesn't hide that the job consists of cleaning cabins and helping in the mess with dishes and such.

you might be thinking, "are you completely crazy? why would you do a job like that?" but, i can tell you that it was so good for me. after the past few tumultuous months, realizing the new job i took in january wasn't at all what they promised and that the guy at the helm was quite likely a ruthless psychopath, add to that my mother's death, and my only child's impending move to arizona, i needed to do something completely different. something where the only thing that mattered was the routine and where i wouldn't get embroiled in any foolish office politics. to be a place where i'd have plenty of time to think, listen to podcasts and stare out at the sea and maybe write a bit and find my way back to myself. and so, for two weeks, i sailed between gothenburg and ghent with a stop once a week in norway and then the final week, we sailed between gothenburg and immingham on the humber river in the uk, also with the stop in brevik. and just look at the fjord up to brevik, it's stunning:

i fell into the rhythms of the journey. up at 6, working until 1 or 1:30, a break until 4, then working again until 7 or so. long days, but i went to bed tired from physical work that somehow seems more honest than the kind of tired you get from sitting in front of a computer all day or gossiping with colleagues around the coffee machine. when the weather was fine, i sat out on the top deck during my breaks, reading a book or writing. i wrote a daily diary entry while i was on board and it felt good to be writing regularly again, even if it much of it was boring drivel. it's something i want to get back to and there's no reason not to do it right here.

i was heartened by a recent post on exactly this over topic on pret a voyager. a blog is the perfect place to do daily writing, and even though blogging has changed dramatically over the years, i was always doing this primarily for me anyway. i just somehow let it slip away from me and i got out of the habit. and when i really think about it, i miss figuring out what i think about the world through blogging. so i'm going to make a daily practice again. starting right here and now.

5-4-3-2-1 method

still reading and rereading that nytimes piece on being kind to yourself.  i haven't been particularly kind to myself of late, so i'm eager to figure out how to do so. according to the article, there's a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 method, which involves naming five things you can see in a room, four things you can hear in the room, three things you can touch or feel, two things you can smell and one good quality about yourself. so here goes...

5 - starbucks cups full of colorful sharpies, my cameras, a flock of unikitties, original art by people whose work i love, a photo of my father-in-law beside a drawing of him that husband did at age 9
4 - it's nearly 2 a.m., so i can hear husband snoring, my own fingers on the keyboard, my ears ringing and silence
3 - i can feel the touch of my fingers on the keyboard, the scratchiness of the wool fabric on the chair and the softness of the lambs wool pelt that's also on my chair
2 - i can smell the fragrance of the shampoo i just used in my shower and if i'm honest, the nagging odor of a litterbox that needs to be changed
1 - i am self-reflective, even if i don't always give myself the right message.

what i have been doing lately

the paris review podcast just finished their first season and it was luminous. every episode is shimmeringly beautiful - a mix of early writing, archival audio and contemporary pieces read by famous voices. it's literary and deep and gorgeously produced. i was inspired by the jamaica kincaid piece in episode 12 - what i have been doing lately. (you need a subscription to read all of it, but you can hear it for free on the podcast.) and while i cannot hope to compare to her writing, i do feel drawn to trying my hand at it...tho' i suspect mine will have a less dreamlike quality.

what i have been doing lately...by me.

it's 4 a.m. i'm awake, kicking off the covers, it's clear outside and i can see the light of the partial moon illuminating the heavy frost that's on the grass. there are a zillion stars in the clear sky. i reach for my phone. what has the spray-tanned buffoon done now? has there been another school shooting? are those articulate florida teenagers winning or are they being snuffed out by old, stodgy white men? not yet, it seems, tho' they are trying (the stodgy men, that is). bob is snuggled between us, stretching out his long body, trusting that we won't roll over onto him. oddly, husband isn't snoring, which in turn makes me wonder if he's still breathing - i feel a rising anxiety at the thought that he's not and i flash back to a similar feeling when sabin was a baby. he is. as she always was. i don't feel panic at being awake, because i'm taking the day off. i can sleep in if i want. when it comes to it, i don't, because of that gorgeous sunrise you can see in the photo above. instead, i get up with husband and the child, who aren't taking the day off, and then i switch batteries on the camera and go out into the cold, clear, still, very frosty morning to capture that pinkish orange horizon. i breathe in great lungsful (lungfuls?) of cold, crisp, clean air. frannie follows me, rolling and flirting at my feet. molly trots over, her compact little body, covered in thick, grey tortiseshell fur. she stretches up a fence post in her version of a catlike sun salutation. freya eventually shows up as well, tho' i don't see where she comes from. her back twitches in anticipation that i will pet her. i do. i feed them all in the greenhouse and they eagerly dig in. i find it hard to leave the sunrise, it keeps getting more and more spectacular and intense as soon as i turn my back on it. so i go back to the edge of the trees and snap a few more photos. more than once. eventually, my hands are cold and my toes too in my rubber boots and i head for the house. i love the still, cold air. birdsong has begun and despite the frost, it sounds like spring. the birds have sex and light and warmth on the brain. i go in, light a match and put on the kettle to make tea. molly comes in with me, hopping up on her chair in the kitchen. it's her throne. i make a cup of tea and crawl back in bed with karl ove knausgaard's autumn. musings he ostensibly wrote to his unborn daughter, but which amount to deep, philosophical (a)musings on everyday things. tho' they are not poetry, they remind me somehow of neruda's elemental odes. i read a few and never do go back to sleep as i had hoped. i get up and do everyday tasks - laundry, unloading the dishwasher, reloading it, taking out the trash. there is a kind of time for thinking and processing in such mundane tasks, so i feel no resentment or frustration over them. i dress, put on some makeup and then it's time to go get the child. i have to run a few errands before she's out of school - grocery store, h&m. she's in a good mood - there's a party tonight for the whole school. and the sun is out, so her mood is vastly improved from the teenage stormcloud of the night before. we listen to the criminal podcast on the way home and she predicts the criminal's sentence before they even say it. she tells me that in addition to studying criminology and criminal justice in sunny arizona, she will likely go to law school as well. i have a moment of awe, observing who she is becoming and how much herself she already is. i feel more a witness to it than responsible and that feels like a privilege of which i'm probably not fully worthy. we drink aloe water - golden kiwi flavor - and pick up some more at the grocery store because it's delicious and it's on sale. we laugh easily about how much we love the feel of the little bits of aloe between our teeth. we get home and while she gets ready for her evening party, i lie down for a bit with a couple of cats. i don't snooze, but lazily check instagram and post a few of the photos i took earlier. it feels like a luxury. i take her to the train. she's happy - the sun is shining, her makeup is perfect and she's looking forward to a nice evening with her friends. i come home and husband is here, but he has a headache, so now he's lying down. i leisurely make a light supper of fishcakes and homemade remoulade. we greedily eat it all up while we watch john oliver and he makes us laugh and feel better about the state of the world. i sit at my computer and write this and husband surfs the auction sites - looking for an oven and stumbling across other interesting things...a vending machine (we could fill it with affordable art), some rugs and a couch that has potential. it's friday night. it's cold and clear and i am glad to be at home.

* * *

so tired of explaining things to idiots.

* * *

so glad i didn't have boy. 

tho' boys need feminism.

* * *

speaking of things i've been doing lately,

have you listened to the podcast i'm making at work yet?

2017 - just the highlights (and a few lowlights)

january - the first weeks were a blur, as i recovered from my trump-induced jaw infection. but i was better just in time to go back to the states and participate in the women's march in washington, d.c. the day after the spray-tanned satan's inauguration. sharing that experience with old friends, husband and the child was unforgettable.

february - coming down from the high of the women's march. it's such a dark month in these northern latitudes, but there was a trip to the uk to do a bit of reconnaissance for later film shoots. i also gathered the girls for a much-needed drink & draw evening. since for me, it's really about the food, i made homemade ramen. yum.

march - brussels for a few days, showing off our lego ship in front of the european parliament during european shipping week. a bit of quality molly time in the greenhouse. i popped down to the shipyard in germany where we were building two new ferries. i had a bit of time for creativity - making soft guns for our spring exhibition with the theme of paradox. oh, and i might have turned fifty.

april - the child went to prom, the garden went in, we had rhubarb coming out of our ears, and we did a grueling three-country shoot for a video. while we were waiting, we managed some fish & chips in cleethorpe, a rather traditional little seaside english village that tasted slightly of faded glory and sadness.

may - probably the most action-packed month, as you can see from the mosaic. two weeks in the us, doing major cleaning in our mother's house - there were tears and laughter (that was just spreading dad's ashes in some of his favorite places), a reunion with old greenie, dad's boat, that my sister bought back for $100, kayaking with mom and a hurried trip to a doctor to have a throat abscess drained (no photo of that, thank goodness) just in time to fly home to denmark. back home, the first kittens awaited us, along with the garden and glorious yellow canola fields. there was even time for a weekend project - painting an old chest with the wonderful annie sloan chalk paints. and i tried the fabulous gasoline grill burger for the very first time. simply the best burgers in the world, hands down.

june - a yoga retreat, mark-marking, a reunion with old friends, gardening, seeing lea thau, my favorite podcaster speak at the royal library, wildflowers in the ditches, gorgeous kittens and the first meals from the garden - potatoes, strawberries, swiss chard and kale. yum! spotting some perler-bombing in copenhagen and lifting the world's largest lego ship down into the dry dock at the maritime museum of denmark. in all, pretty eventful and good.

july - a holiday in lithuania - it's a hidden gem in europe, i tell you. highly recommend! then home to berries - blackcurrants and red - and kittens growing up and more kittens being born. and a blissful three-day ceramics course with the fabulous nina lund. my hole-y rock collection grew and i found a creative way of displaying it on a rusty old piece of wire i found and there was yet another trip to film in the uk.

august - filming the lifting of some seriously big objects and working with an awesome team. then back home to the garden in full swing. a kickoff trip for a new team sailing back and forth to oslo - pretty cool when you get to use your ship as a meeting room. then MORE kittens - this time, charlie had six - that was too many and so we resolved it would be her last batch. a wonderful weekend getaway with my creative friends down in højer, a new-to-me corner of denmark - it rejuvenated my soul after a rainy, cold summer. and lastly, a wonderful visit from an old friend who we met when we were in macedonia.

september - bob is growing up so fast. i prepared for an exhibition of my photos at the local library. we visited hjerl hede, a museum with examples of houses through time on a rare nice late summer day. a return to the yoga mat after too long an absence. quality cat time. a trip to the beach with another lego friend. some pretty regular work in my art journal, which i took up again after the retreat at the end of august. and some autumn flowers from the garden. and rounding out the month winning a european digital award in berlin for our lego ship project. awesome, except for the 12 hours it took to drive back from berlin.

october - the leaves started to fall. but there was time for some sunny days in the garden in the company of my garden kitties, molly and her granddaughter bella. the first of the amanitas. an apple tart. time spent reconnecting with old friends (and bunnies), some additions to the wardrobe, enjoying the comfort of kittens after slicing my finger on a french press that exploded in my hands and sent me to the emergency room for six stitches. more quality time with cats. and another reunion with an old friend who gave a wonderful lecture on creativity. it occurs to me that this may have been the year of reuniting with old friends! that's a rather magical realization of putting together this end-of-year look back.

november - husband ran for the city council, as a member of a new party. alas, he didn't get in, but he learned a lot from the campaign and he showed that he's not just going to complain about the politics, but do something about it. there was much time spent with the best batch of kittens we've ever had - frannie outdid herself with these lovelies. but now they've all gone to their new homes and are being loved there. a tiny little project was worked on, but more about that in the new year. gemma and gretchen - it was hard parting with them, but i can't keep all the kitties.

december - the darkest, rainiest, coldest month. but still there was joy - in the form of a whimsical monkey from skinny laminx, a hilarious "welcome" mat, handmade gifts to myself (earrings, a candle holder inspired by some primitive church paintings, sweet little wonky blue pots), an irresistible seasonal highlighter from chanel, learning how to make flødeboller and a lot of time spent in the center of copenhagen, working on a passion project that's also part of my job. for my christmas present, husband made great progress in the kitchen and we actually cooked out there on new year's eve! love the orla kiely wallpaper we chose for the backsplash! and just before christmas, we went out and chose a tree - bickering all the way, as per tradition.

when i think about it, 2017 seemed hard - i think because of the relentless awfulness of the madman at the helm. it wasn't a year in which i slept all that well. but when i look back at it like this, in pictures (and yes, i'm still taking a daily photo, tho' most were with my iPhone this year), it was also filled with joy and laughter and pleasure - much more than i realized. i bid it farewell with more affection than i thought i would. and greet 2018 with open arms. happy new year!

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.

feeling the moment

a slightly disgruntled molly surveys the world around her. she's not super keen on all those other cats that seem to be milling around the place, so she's got a slightly sardonic look. but i admire how she lives completely in the moment, just feeling what she feels and experiencing what she experiences. she does have expectations - that breakfast and dinner will be provided, that there will be some petting and rubbing under her chin when she desires it. on her terms. and when she's not pleased with those other cats, they get the occasional bop on the head with a lightning quick paw or else she climbs the nearest tree to put some distance between them and her.

now, i'm not advocating going around bopping people on the head, but i am advocating just feeling what it is you're feeling in a given moment. when, last evening at the choir, i felt i wasn't accepted and welcome, there is validity to that feeling. something (several somethings, in fact) did provoke me to feel that way, it was real and so were my hurt feelings. so all of the explanations and making light of them and saying, "that's not how it was meant" (because apparently no one really wants to be xenophobic, they just do it for fun) do not actually change the reality of how i felt in that moment. and i'll admit i feel a bit resentful of not just being allowed to feel what i feel. why do people always try to talk you out of it, instead of accepting your right to your reactions and to how you feel? feelings are valid in the moment. while they may not always be right or grounded in the intentions of those who provoked them, they are real. and to recognize that reality is the only way to process them and get through them. whether it takes a bop on the head (including your own sometimes), or whether it just takes running off and climbing a tree to absent yourself from a situation, feelings need to be experienced for what they are.

expectations will kick you every time

i am in need of a bit of wonder woman's fearlessness at the moment.

i put myself in a situation this evening which made me realize that i'm still feeling pretty wounded. i went with a friend to sing with a little countryside gospel choir. i went with high hopes to be energized and filled with happiness by soulful gospel music and i'm afraid that didn't happen. and to be honest, i didn't know that i expected that until it didn't happen. expectations can really ruin things.

it started with the usual round of shaking everyone's hand, which always wrong-foots me. it's an aspect of danish culture that i never really get used to or comfortable with. going around a room, shaking hands with strangers and saying your name is, in fact, a really good idea, but it makes me wildly uncomfortable, even after all these years. then, i ended up standing with my friend, who was standing with the sopranos. i'm an alto and was told, rather rudely, in my opinion, that i needed to go to the other side. we hadn't been singing in parts at the time and crossing the half circle, in front of everyone, after being rather summarily sent over there, felt like a statement on my singing ability. "get over there because i can't stand the sound of your voice next to me." it probably wasn't meant that way, but it definitely felt that way.  and it took me awhile to talk myself out of my prickly reaction. truthfully, i never fully shook it off, especially as it felt like the part of the circle i found myself in kept pushing me back and kept me a step out of it.

the songs we were singing didn't help. they were all unfamiliar, difficult arrangements and for the first one, we didn't have the music. i'm a music reader. i need to see the actual notes on the page, i don't do well just listening and humming along at first. and it wasn't like the others knew the songs either, they were new for all. and it wasn't the warm, familiar songs i had expected. see, there're those expectations again. they creep in, even when you don't even know they're there, spoiling the experience.

the second song should have been familiar (happy day), but it was a new arrangement that was very different and difficult. at least we had the music to look at, but with three parts - soprano, alto and tenor, and varying ability of those there to follow the sheet music, i felt bewildered at times, thinking i was the only one in the room reading the actual notes on the page and that all of the others were in on this alternative method of reading music that i didn't know about. leaving me once again feeling vulnerable and slightly rejected.

not what i wanted to feel at the gospel choir.

i wanted to enter a room of people who were open and warm, or who had been opened up and warmed through by the familiar, energizing gospel music of my cultural background (this was a reasonable expectation, right?). because although i am a midwestern white girl, i do know gospel music when i hear it. and i wanted to give myself over to that energy and soul and warmth. and it simply wasn't there in a little parish house in denmark full of middle aged white women and a couple of men. and i am undoubtedly a middle-aged white woman as well, so maybe i shouldn't talk. but, i think you can take the gospel out of the US, but you can't retain the soul of it so far from its origins, especially if you have danish composers creating their disjointed version of it. one song was seriously like four very different genres smooshed together into one and it was downright disorienting. again, not the energy and comfort i was looking for.

tonight, i was reminded that i am wounded and it made me sad. and left me with that old familiar mid-atlantic feeling. i'll grant that i would be too white trying to sing with a real gospel choir in the states, but i can't even fit in with one here. so i'm left alone, somewhere in between.

i don't know why in these moments that i can't summon the energy to dive in and sing along on the happy day solo part, giving some of the energy to the room that i was wishing it would give to me. i don't know where my confidence has gone. and i don't really know how to recover it.

my inner wonder woman, where are you when i need you?

missing my new york window

it's rather easy, when you're walking down the busy streets of new york city, to forget to look up. cyndy tried to warn us about this, but i'm not sure i fully appreciated it until wandering alone on my last day. i looked up at the imposing structures lining 5th avenue ahead of me and found them quite surprising and surprisingly the opposite of beautiful. they are dominant, cold, masculine, insurmountable, full of inhuman perfect lines and squareyness. they're not comforting or hyggeligt. at all. and i wonder whether they were shaped by the people who made them or whether the people who made them were shaped by them. or whether those lines blurred along the way and it's now impossible to say. do they inspire a cold, clinical, hard view of the world? one that resulted in the hubris of the financial crisis, which we're all still trying to shake off? would the world be a different place if the architecture of new york city was different? but could the architecture of new york city be any different than it is? or was it destined to be this way?

what is it that draws us to a place? makes us love it? or hate it almost instantly? everyone always told me that i would love new york. and in many ways, i did. the pulse, the vibe, the walkability, the whole sense that it was just alive and happening in every imaginable way. the food. the people having total screaming matches on the street at another person or into a telephone. the diversity. but i wouldn't want to live there. i think it would get to me after awhile. all that erect, hard, agressive squareyness.

so while i loved every minute of my first trip to new york, i'm not a new york person. i didn't fall head over heels for it the way i did with cape town. or london. or istanbul. or seattle. or san francisco. or moscow. to be fair, i'm not sure i'd fall for moscow in the same way today. it had to do with a certain phase and time of my life. and perhaps i just missed my new york window.

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the architecture of new york city got amy thinking as well. 

in which the post ends up quite different than what she envisioned when she sat down to write it

i didn't begin blogging to find a community. i began blogging to find my way back to myself after leaving a job which was very hectic and busy and hardly left me time to pee, let alone be creative. i began blogging to get back in touch with writing, which i had always loved and tap back into my creative side. and frankly, to keep find regain my sanity. as i always say, blogging is cheaper than therapy.

little by little, i did find a community of like-minded (or perhaps like-humored) souls and after blogger named my little musings a blog of note in april 2009, a community found me. many of those who found me are still among my friends today, even tho' most have stopped blogging and we have our virtual social life over on facebook (that bothers me a bit, to turn so many of my social interactions over to them, but that's the stuff of another post). in a few weeks, i'm going to be getting together with some of them, several for the first time, tho' we feel like old friends.

blogging has given me so much...a place to work out what i think about both the deep and the trivial, an interest (and a practice) in photography, loads of laughter, regular catharsis and probably most of all, a place to store my memories. i wouldn't want to be without it, even tho' i feel like the secrets i'm surrounded by at work these days get in my way and hold me back from writing. i think it's because they cramp my sense of immediacy and that has been rather a hallmark of this blog, whether it was impassioned rants about encounters in the grocery store with solipsistic danes or the latest apple product to cross our doorstep or the progress on the quilt i'm making. the great majority of the photos i've used here were taken minutes before i posted them. i guess i'm just an immediate sort of person, which i think is different than living in the moment (but that's, again, the stuff of a different blog post).

because this blog post is about finding that virtual community (or at least it was when i started out).  i have the privilege of investigating various online communities these days. ones centered around a certain little plastic brick. and they are as fascinating and varied as the sets themselves. some are focused on the bitty small details of the bricks (when a certain grey color was discontinued is still lamented by a certain segment of fans even years later). some are focused on a particular theme - trains, space, star wars, pirates and yes, minifigs.

i've found several communities of people who pretty much appear to photograph nothing but minifigs, at least if you believe their instagram feeds (maybe they have entirely separate instagram accounts for food pictures and cat pictures, i don't know). my own instagram account is a mish-mash of, again, whatever is immediate to me. i take the "insta" part of instagram very seriously. i don't take photos with my big girl camera and spend hours editing them before posting them to instagram. i pretty much post whatever tickles my fancy at a given moment, in that moment, joking that we don't really know it happened unless we've instagrammed it. i'm not saying i don't appreciate the beautiful, atmospheric, well-curated feeds, i'm just saying it's not how i operate.

and this has made me think about my own minifig photos. for the most part, i take them in a single setting...in the nice light in the windowsill of our living room, on an old-fashioned scale. for me, my photos of them are less a small story staged in a small scene (unless i use them to tell a story here), than they are a catalog of which minifigs i have. after i photograph them there, i'm actually even able to give them away if they happen to suit someone who comes by (because everyone needs a yeti with a popsicle at some point). but aside from enabling causing some of my existing bloggy friends to also begin madly collecting the little guys, i haven't sought community through my minifigs. but via my research and flickr and instagram and even google+ (these minifig peeps are using g+, which makes them awesome in my book), i am slowly finding a community there as well. people say the internet is isolating, but i've not seen much evidence for that.

keeping the threads together

as i continue to take a photo every day, i've had cause to ponder why i continue. haven't i taken photos of everything in my surroundings? is there ever anything new? why do i do it? the community that was there in the beginning has dissolved, so that's no longer why i do it. is it just a habit at this point? do i move my photography towards a better place with these daily photos? or is it just a mundane plodding along that i do out of habit?

very early on in my first official, declared 365 project (2010), i realized that the project wasn't about taking an awesome photo every day, it was about memory and about finding something every day that i wanted to remember, a kind of visual documentation of my life. that was back in 2010. here i am, still going strong with my daily photo and when i look through my various iPhoto libraries (yes, i have multiple libraries, because once they reach a certain size, they make my now elderly iMac a bit unhappy and sluggish, so i have to start a new one), i realize that i pretty much began taking a photo every day when i bought my first DSLR in may 2008. i may have missed a few days there in that first year, but from 2009, i have one or other photo from every single day. even husband relies on this, sometimes asking me, "when was it we got the first chickens?" or "what was the date we picked up the pigs?" - because he knows that i'll have a photo of it that will help us remember.

my 365 project hasn't had a specific theme, other than the odd assignment i've given myself from time to time. it's been documentary, most of all. but nonetheless, you can trace my various interests and obsessions and yes, even my travels, throughout. not every photo is brilliant, in fact, probably only a very few of them are, but it does somehow contain throughout the threads of a life...my life. and for me, that's reason enough to keep doing it.

you can see much of it (from 2011 onwards) here, if you're interested.

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.

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stupid things hard-core christians say.

hilarious, but also really, really sad.

and possibly more than a little disturbing.

slow sunday stretches to the wee hours of tuesday

it was raining steadily, if gently, all day sunday. that was fine, as there was plenty of tidying up to do inside that's been sadly neglected as we spend all of our waking hours outdoors. the monotony of the rain and the grey skies gave the day a slowed-down feeling. the slow feeling didn't let up that much even as we spontaneously decided to watch the world cup finals, as it was an awfully long match with very little scoring. if it hadn't been for twitter, and laughing with friends, i'd have nodded off.

a rainy quiet day leaves me feeling introspective and so it was only fitting that i came across this piece on virginia wolff in the new yorker. she had this notion that there was always this place inside of us which we hide, even from ourselves. she even embraced this hiding, like a gift of sorts, a core which we keep eternally as a surprise. i'm not sure that i agree that we hide these places from ourselves so much as that we are unable to articulate them, even to ourselves. i would argue that we know very well they're there, and the keen observers of us around us sense them as well. but there is something at our core that's inarticulable (i think that's possibly a word that i just made up), something that might well be the very stuff of who we are. and we probably come closest to it when we are alone with ourselves and our own thoughts. and maybe it's even why we crave time alone, to be closer to ourselves.

one of my favorite quotes of all time is from one of barbara kingsolver's early novels (the bean trees, i think), she says, "you never know how inside of themselves people are." i think that's what virginia wolff was getting at as well and perhaps the reason she had to end it all is that she couldn't really stand the revelation of self there at her core. she couldn't face that it was as inexpressible as it is. for a writer, the inexpressible must be the very worst thing. or maybe the fear of finally expressing it and getting to the bottom of it and having no mysteries left there in the core. or just the raw, naked, stark truth of who we really are at the base of it.

see. i told you the rain made me introspective. and there are times when i just have to write these things down in order to illuminate what i really think about them. and sometimes that writing only gets me part way there. thank you for reading.

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on a lighter note...

i really love this food blog.

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and how fabulous are these moody family portraits?

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and you thought LEGO was just a toy.

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are americans really too stupid for GMO labeling?
a congressional panel thinks so.

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here is a really great and thorough account of the project i've been working on since march.
i might have mentioned that i love my job.

stream of consciousness

seriously, wtf? (even molly thinks so)
and she's also a transplant from the midwest.

when you live your life outside of the culture of your birth, no matter how "integrated" and part of things you think you are, there will always be moments where you are smacked up side of the head with the big old stick of feeling you don't belong. it can happen at the grocery store, in traffic, at lunch, at work, when people are late for a meeting or oddly if the stewardess skips your drinks order on a plane. but it's very worst of all when it happens in your home, among those you love and have chosen as your family. and the problem is that you can never really know when that feeling will strike. it's a feeling borne of a complex combination of factors and there's no way that i've found to predict when that combination will be exactly right, or rather, wrong, and it will hit you that you are still an outsider. and when it hits you, everything is magnified. the smallest thing becomes enormous and has the capacity to grow and grow in your mind, crowding out any of the feelings of belonging you may have harbored, and convincing you that they were never real. it's quite horrible, actually. especially because of how little it takes and how that thing can be so random and so subject to the fragile barometric pressure of feelings and hormones and possibly wind speed and temperature and butterflies in the amazon rainforest and the price of corn futures on the chicago exchange. and it's so distressing that all you've built up over such a long time can be so easily smashed and you feel like you're starting all over again and you wonder if you even want to. but you probably aren't, it just feels like that in the moment itself and the moments that follow. but it likely won't last and even as you're in the middle of it and you realize it's a complicated combination of the obliviousness your husband has to extended family matters generally (which is different than not caring, tho' it's hard to see that when you're in this place) and your own sadness that some of those you considered your favorite family members didn't come to sabin's party or even send her a card or offer a proper explanation of their absence, plus your chosen displacement from the culture of your birth and possibly a teency weency touch of pms thrown into the mix, you still find it very hard to be rational and non-emotional about the whole thing. all he had to do was tell you he received a text that his sister had a new baby girl and it would never have happened. this whole strange avalanche of tears and emotions and being reminded that you're an outsider could easily have been avoided, if only you knew what would trigger it. and ironically, you can't even learn from the situation, because something else entirely will trigger it next time. and you'll ride the roller coaster again. and you'll get through it. and probably the good bits of life wouldn't seem so good without the bits that seem pretty awful. and maybe that mid-atlantic feeling is just a permanent state of being.

reflections on the poetics of unsolvable problems

i went to a most interesting salon evening tonight. i drank too much coffee and had my head filled with so many new and exciting ways of thinking about things that i can't sleep. i went because the title of the talk was the poetics of the unsolvable and i loved both the notion that there was a poetics, but also that something could unsolvable in these times when we think there is a quick fix for everything. what it turned out to be was a researcher who had looked at the ways that creative interventions in management training could change things for managers and how they think and learn presented his research. best of all, he asked us to try out some of his experiments. i don't yet have it all straight in my head, but already i feel that it awakened in me new ways of thinking about things that will be very valuable to me.

in his study, he asked his subjects to come up with a problem that seemed unsolvable. then he asked them to take three approaches to it. in the first, he wanted them to do a systematic, rational analysis of the problem, which would eventually result in a map of their assumptions - a problem statement, who the actors were in the problem, what their interests are, then the distinctions and eventually a set of dimensions the problem (i understand these dimensions as a kind of list of binaries and quite black and white). it was these dimensions that could eventually be mapped in some way. we had only a short amount of time, so all we did was write a problem statement and begin looking at who was involved and what were their interests. i didn't get as far as distinctions (partially because time was short and partially because i didn't entirely understand what he meant by that). i would actually say that this resembles my usual approach to solving problems in quite a rational, systematic, analytical way. it undoubtedly lends to overthinking and confirming yourself in your opinion that the problem really is unsolvable. ironically, it also makes you think you see the problem more clearly and in some sense, maybe you even do.

the second approach was to apply metaphors to the problem. he asked us to think of the problem as a plant and quickly sketch or describe it. then he asked us to think of the problem as a movie or novel and note the work that first came to mind. we didn't delve a whole lot deeper than this and alas, fargo was the movie that sprang to mind when i thought of my problem. i'll need to ponder the meaning of that a bit more. actually, i had two problems noted down (that's how i roll) and the film that sprang to mind for the second problem was the matrix. that's also something that bears more thought. i tried to make books spring to mind for my problems, but oddly, none did. in his experiment, he sent the subjects out with cameras to take a photo that would stand as a metaphor of the problem. i would love to have done that (and let's face it, i do it most days here on mpc - after all, blogging is cheaper than therapy).

the third and perhaps most interesting approach was to describe the problem as a sensory experience; to give it physical sensation. this was difficult (especially in a short time) and my list included broad emotions - stressful, negative, tense. i had to keep reminding myself to stick to physical sensations - loud, grating, jarring. but it wasn't easy and the exercise gave me a tightness in my chest and i felt a little bit that i couldn't breathe. so trying to describe it as a physical sensation actually caused a physical sensation in my body. this made me realize that mind and body are so much more connected that i generally think they are. and this made me think i need to take better care of my body and use it more wisely. i'd like to think i take better care of my mind, feeding it with nourishing books and images and thoughts. my body probably needs less caffeine, alcohol and unhealthy foods. i must remember that (she says as she takes a sip of wine).

and although listing my problem as a sensory experience caused a physical reaction in my body, it also had a distancing effect, making me more able to look upon my problem from a new angle, with less emotion and less judgement. which is quite new and i think it's quite difficult for us to be judgement-free, as we come loaded with expectations and judgements from all of our previous learnings and experiences. it was quite freeing to somehow let go of that. i'd like to do that more.

if we'd had more time, he would have asked us to write a poem based on the list of sensory experiences. he would have given us only 20 minutes, so that the poem would be more automatic and we wouldn't have time to sensor or polish it. he showed us some of the results from his subjects and they were powerful. i feel i missed the window on the poem for this experience, but i'm going to go through the exercise again.

and do you want to know what the problem i thought about was? (at least the main one?) it was the problem of being productive in an open office environment. because i think that's pretty much impossible. i won't say that i solved it, not even remotely, but i got closer to seeing a clearer picture of why i don't like such spaces. and that may be a step towards an eventual solution. and that feels pretty powerful. i'd like to think of myself as more reflected than most and i do (as you know, if you are a regular reader), tend to over-analyze things, so having new tools which will help me think about things in new ways is awesome.