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.

there comes a time...

in all of my work-at-home weeks, i always reach a point when i think, "today, i shall bathe and get dressed and go forth among people. i shall put these sweatpants and this t-shirt that i've been wearing day and night for the past 3-4 days into the laundry basket and put on real clothing--like tights and a cheery dress. i shall behave like a human being today." it helps if the sun comes out. because cloudy, windy, rainy days only promote my hermit-like tendencies.

and then i was reminded of a place that could well be termed hermit heaven. it's called meteora and it's in greece. it's inland in north central greece, in a strange moonlike landscape, where these porous, harsh, rocky hills suddenly stick up out of the flat plain.

in this strange and rather mysterious place, monks built countless monasteries, high on the peaks.

eight-ten of them are still in operation and open to the public (if you like to climb), but there are many ruins around on outcroppings that look like they must have been impossible to reach. they are, to my imagination, impossibly romantic in their isolation.

there are countless more little caves hollowed out in the hillsides, where individual hermit monks went to be on their own. undoubtedly wearing the same thing for days on end and muttering to themselves and resenting intrusions, much as i do around here.

although i'm not fond of heights, i'm attracted to the idea of being somewhere where the only way to get there would be a ladder like this...

because you could see whoever was coming quite a long ways off.  and the sheer difficulty of it would put most intruders off.

i've been there twice, but feel its allure pulling me back, probably due the amount of time i spend alone, but also because it's a wonderful and mysterious place. maybe that's where we should go this summer.

but first, i should probably get dressed.

it was a dark and stormy day...

blame it on the moon

Rxbambi tagged me earlier this week to do a list of six things that get me pissed. initially i was going to make a list of my favorite kinds of gin, but then i realized it wasn't that kind of pissed.  on that particular day, i was feeling that the world was quite rosy and couldn't actually think of six things, but let me tell you, now i can...

1. big sisters using sabin's mobile - sabin's big sisters have their own mobile phones, but they always go nuts texting all of their friends on hers when they're here, because theirs are the pre-paid card kind and they don't want to use up their own SMSes. i'm normally fine with this because we've got an unlimited SMS plan on sabin's phone, she doesn't use any herself and so it seems ok that it gets used. UNTIL....i learned today that they had subscribed to some stupid spam-like SMS thing that repeatedly sends you texts about a hummingbird and it costs 15DKK every time. that's $3. which translates to $36 a month. which pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. especially because i hadn't looked closely at that bill and it's now the 3rd month the charge appears there (so much for my attentiveness to bills, eh?). i hadn't looked at it because sometimes sabin calls my norwegian number when i'm in norway and i thought it was just that. it wasn't. grr.
2. whipping wind - it's been blowing steadily for two days and i'm really. really. really. tired. of. it.
3. people who send an invitation to a party (that's not a wedding but just an ordinary dinner party) three months in advance - i have no friggin' clue whether i want to have dinner with you three months from now. call me the day before. fokken danes.
4. sexist misogynist dinosaurs in shipping - i don't actually encounter them very often, but when i do, it pisses me off like nothing else. do. not. underestimate. me. just. because. i'm. a. girl. or i shall plant this jessica simpson stiletto squarely in your eyeball.
5. Thuesen Jensen - they're the danish importer of Kitchen Aid products. they have no web presence--their "website" goes to an eLearning log-in thing. they are impossible to contact, no phone number, no email and they are absolute rubbish at service (which one supposes is why they are impossible to contact). they are giving Kitchen Aid a bad name. i have on two occasions now had a problem with the Kitchen Aid food processor i bought last summer. and twice, instead of just giving me a new one and then dealing with it on their end, they made the shop send it in, taking nearly a month to fix it both times. so, i've been without my food processor (which i use regularly) for two of the eight months i've owned it. i just got it back again, with a new bowl on it. why didn't they give me that the first time they took it, since it was the same problem both times. i really think Kitchen Aid should know how bad they are and what a bad name they're giving to Kitchen Aid. i only know their name because i dragged it out of my local shop. and now, i hope that this reference to their name comes up the next time someone googles Thuesen Jensen, because they are complete and utter crap and should have their rights to import Kitchen Aid taken away. when someone pays 3500DKK ($700USD) for their fokken food processor, they expect it to work and if it doesn't, they expect to have a new one that does work inside of about 3 minutes. end. of. story. it better stay fixed this time, or you all will be reading about this on a daily basis. (sorry to threaten you when i'm really threatening them.)
6. people with the wrong priorities - certain family members recently failed to be there on two big occasions--mathilde's confirmation and the party celebrating aunty M's dictionary. i think that's really friggin' selfish and egotistical. you can put off going to your precious summer house where you go every weekend all summer long for things that happen only once in a lifetime. how often does a young person get confirmed (if they're not baptist or whatever)? and how often do you celebrate the culmination of ten years' work? get your fokken priorities straight. there are certain things you are simply obligated to do. these two things were prime examples of them. 

hmmm...it seems like it might be that time that rolls around every month when husband gets really annoying. why do you suppose he does that? speaking of him, where is he and why isn't he making me some dinner?

perhaps i need that gin list after all:

1. hendrick's
2. beefeater crown jewel (in the purple bottle)
3. g'vine
4. bombay sapphire
5. beefeater 24
6. the local indian gin i had one time in chennai (believe me, it was the only good thing about chennai)

on that note, i think i'll go check out how we're fixed for tonic. i know i just bought limes...