the view from sunday night

i doodled this with a feather and payne's grey ink while watching goldfinger with my family. we're making our way through all of the james bond films, from the very beginning. i'm struck by that sean connery wasn't actually that cute when he was younger and he's kind of a terrible actor. the fight scenes are the worst and there are hilarious low budget moments in the film. it doesn't hold up well and yet it's still somehow iconic. i was happy that i was drawing during it tho', i think it might have been wasted time if i hadn't been.

* * *

it was a good weekend - spent mostly in the company of kittens, who are at peak playful. i opened a photo exhibition (more about that below). the afternoon was sunny on saturday, so i mowed the lawn, which makes me surprisingly happy. i only stopped when it started to rain and would have liked to have kept mowing. we have a big lawn and to do all of it takes over an hour, but i'm always a little bit sad when it's done. i made homemade sweet & sour chicken for saturday dinner, which is easier than i thought it would be, even making the sauce from scratch. we had homemade black currant ice cream with hot fudge sauce for dessert. i saw not one, but two tiny baby hedgehogs in the garden. i picked blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and pears in the garden and made them into a beautiful crostata (just another name for a rustic, lazy person's pie). i did all of the laundry, which gives me satisfaction as well, less than the lawn mowing, but satisfying nonetheless. i picked elderberries and made juice. they're small and tho' i picked a kettleful, it only made one bottle, so i'll have to go in search of more, because just one bottle won't do. there's nothing better than a warm elderberry beverage on a winter day.

* * *

i hung some of my photos as an exhibition in our gallery space at our local library. i was a bit disappointed in the quality of the prints i ordered online (photobox, i'm looking at you), but now i know not to order there. it is still nice to see them printed, framed and hung all together - in this digital world, we don't do this enough. i thought i was choosing photos on the theme of "in the wild," with a focus on nature, but they all seem to be rather still and quiet and not wild at all. it's interesting, actually. it must be something i instinctively sought - moments of peaceful stillness.

* * *

i'm really sick of the punditry dissing hillary for writing a book about her experience as the first woman presidential candidate of a major party. of course she should write a book and of course she should analyze what happened and what went wrong. she has every right to do so. she may not have sufficient distance to come to the ultimate conclusion (i don't know yet, as my copy hasn't arrived), but she has every right to write it. she lived it and it must have hurt like a motherfucker to lose to that buffoon. so shut the fuck up already and let her have her say. i can't help but think that if she were a man, there wouldn't be the same snide comments about the book.

* * *

the venerated TLS published a cover story by a nicholas gibbs, who claimed to have deciphered the voinych manuscript. the atlantic (and others) say, not so much. and this guy claims, on twitter, that nicholas gibbs doesn't even exist, and the whole thing is a pale fire-style stunt. whatever it is, that infernal manuscript continues to fascinate.

* * *

they say that postmodernism is dead. but aren't we still living it? what were we thinking, questioning reality and whether anything could be real? what a mess that's gotten us into now, with a post-truth spray-tanned president spewing his daily lies on twitter. could it get any more postmodern than that?

* * *

what happened to leftovers?

the scent of the summer

you know, if you've been reading for awhile, that i love perfume. i recently read this piece about finding your personal scent in the lenny letter. and it's all about layering. even before reading this, i had taken to combining a couple of scents - at the moment, it's been a rather unorthodox combination of the sweetness of  for her by narciso rodriguez and the spicy, greenish masculinity of vetiver insolent by miller harris, but it's felt like the right scent for me at the moment. i was relieved to read in the article that a note or two of something rancorous is in fashion, since this cold, damp summer combined with living in our old farmhouse, my personal scent is surely laced with a healthy dose of mustiness from the damp that seeps up through the brick walls thanks to high ground water. there's probably also a dash of litterbox needing to be changed and perhaps a vague aroma of spilled coffee thrown in, which may be a note or two too many of rancour.

when we were in lithuania, i ran into these beautiful scents, named after italian cities, in a high end perfume shop. i'm not even sure who makes them. i tend to have trouble with scents and my own body chemistry, as they can turn rather nasty on me, especially if they are full of synthetic ingredients. but i tried, over a couple of days, four of these gorgeous scents and they all just got more beautiful on me. tho' at €149 per bottle, i didn't buy one, having decided we were having a vacation experience, not a vacation shopping trip. but, i may have to try to find them again and buy one, as they were just gorgeous. the packaging is simple and elegant as well. they have everything one could hope for in a scent. maybe this autumn..i think florentia would be lovely when paired with the dusky scent of autumn leaves.

things kids should do as kids

i keep seeing this piece about things that kids should do by themselves before they turn 13 circulating on facebook. and while it's all well and good that kids do their own homework and can make their own lunch (i really should have enforced that one) and set their own alarms, i feel like it's kind of a careful and tentative list and a little self-serving for the parents. and who the hell doesn't talk to the teacher when it's necessary or help with homework? that's just lazy, it seems to me.

my child is 16 now, but when i think back to the things she did before she was 13, i could add a number of things to the list:

~ fly somewhere alone. when she was 7, we sent the child to the states for the summer. of course, we paid the unaccompanied minor fee to sas, and i delivered her to the gate in copenhagen and my sister was waiting for her outside customs in chicago, but she did an 8 hour flight by herself. she had to entertain herself, excuse herself to go to the bathroom, tell the stewardesses what she wanted to drink and mess with that infernal onboard entertainment system on her own. it wasn't her first time on a plane, so she was already a routine traveler and knew how it worked, but it was still a big step. and she did it with flying colors, also flying home again on her own at the end of the summer.

~ have secrets. we all need something that's our own, that we maybe share with a friend, but not necessarily our parents. a couple of summers ago, we were walking down a creek that flows behind our property and the child and her best friend were reminiscing about a time that they ran scared from some aggressive swans at a little lake that you come to, some ways down the creek. i knew they had played down there, but not that they'd had a bit of an exciting experience, nor that they had walked as far up the creek as they had. it made them strong and brave and gave them something they had together that wasn't anyone else's.

~ eat food you planted and picked yourself in a garden. our child has grown up picking strawberries, popping a warm, sweet cherry tomato, picked directly from the greenhouse into her mouth, sifting through soil after freshly-dug potatoes. she knows where food comes from and how it tastes different and much better than what you buy in the store. she has spent time helping me pick countless little tiny violets so we could make a vivid purple cordial that we mixed with fizzy water and enjoyed on a hot summer day.

~ make the child use public transport. to get to school, to get to a movie, to get to her friends, to get to a party. buy a travel card and know how to use it. to find her way to the brandy melville at sloane square in london, leading the way for a group of her friends. to get herself around london. and copenhagen. and st. petersburg. know how to read a metro map. and figure out how to get on the metro in the right direction. these are important steps to adulting.

~ eat sushi. the child should learn to eat sushi. early and often. mine started at age two and a half. and at about 4, she woke up briefly in a restaurant in manila, ate her weight in sashimi and then fell back asleep. i'm pretty proud of that.

and if i expand the age range to 15, there are a couple more...

~ be part of a major protest for a worthy cause. i will be eternally grateful to my strong female cousins for the idea that we would head for the women's march in washington, d.c. and i am so happy to have shared the experience with my 15-year-old child. now she knows the energy of half a million women and people and her father who support women on her own body and mind and psyche. it strikes me as one of my strongest parenting moments.

~ know the difference between good makeup and drugstore makeup. yes, this is a girl thing, but it's important in today's world. and some drugstore makeup is good, but you can't know which unless you've tried it and also tried the good stuff. (and yes, maybe i am justifying buying my child chanel foundation. but that doesn't make it any less important.)

* * *

very cool, evocative photos of small town america.

and he even used flash! or maybe just lit them up at night.

* * *

what a cool story. goes off to buy a metal detector.

fragments from my draft folder

* * *

drunk j. crew is my new favorite tumblr.

* * *

guess what i'll be doing doing this summer...filming this.

* * *

whatever you think of him, this speech is filled with logic. and yes, i teared up watching it. whatever you believe. get out there and vote. and please think of all of our children when you do so.

* * *

and speaking of the ignorance rampant in the world, the bbc is discussing it here. and i have to admit it makes me fearful of the world we're leaving to sabin. (3/3.2016)

* * *

we are in the age of the fetish of everything. (26/4.2015)

* * *

a friend recently shared a link to  this blog piece, written by a dane on how weird he realized danes were once he had spent some time out there in the world. she thanked me for hanging in there anyway, which was pretty sweet. (28/9.2014)

* * *

my bloggy friend jessica of scrumdillydilly, who i've been reading since, well, forever, recently wrote a great post about the insecurities brought on by the internet. (17/7.2014)

* * *

an interesting piece in information on the constitution of the modern family in denmark, where 45% live in a non-traditional family - with traditional being original mother and father and children living together under one roof.(23/3.2014)

* * *

mel's beautiful words on instagram....This is the book that started the flood. In 2010, my teacher asked me to write in a journal - I only know the year because of the dates in these pages. The wife of a writer, we had lots of blank books lying around - gifts from friends and family - and after many failed attempts of my own over the years, I was skeptical. She urged me to try - pen and paper, by hand. The first weeks worth of pages are here, on 20 lb printer paper - temporary, disposable. Another teacher said - it doesn't matter what you write - it's space just for you. That unlocked something and after five days I pulled this empty book off the shelf and the words started leaking out of my pen. This is the book that showed me that the stories I told myself weren't always true, that the wild thoughts up in my head are not representative of reality. That the approval I'd been seeking was really my own (those words exactly came out on the page). That no feelings are unacceptable and allowing them space to say their piece helps them move on through. That the most important relationship of my life is the one I have with my own self, and that that relationship reflects on every other. This is the book that cracked the dam.

---------
i'm doing a bit of spring cleaning in my blog drafts folder. nearly 20 items had accumulated there. mostly fragments. some links. passing thoughts, awaiting deeper analysis. they had begun to weigh me down, and yet i didn't want to lose them either, so i decided to go through them, combine them and get them out of the way. hopefully to make room for new, fresh, livelier thoughts and words. 

monday morning at my desk

i don't know what made me open twitter first thing this morning. it's not something i normally do. i guess it was to complain to pinterest about how they changed their "oops, you've already pinned this" message to the much more boring and impersonal "you've already saved this pin." it's like they experienced people not knowing what "pinned" meant and so they changed it to "saved" to serve the lowest common denominator. come on pinterest, give us more credit than that.  but i digress... i went to twitter and then i foolishly stayed for awhile. and discovered that the feed is full of complaints (ironic that i'm complaining, i know, since i went there to complain myself) and fear and speculation and righteousness. whether it's arrogant white dudes admitting murder on HBO or the apparent disappearance of putin or vanuatu's destruction at the hands of a tropical cyclone (do cyclones have hands?) or the persecution of confused elderly people by the DSB or just jeremy clarkson, it's all negative somehow. and definitely not conducive to starting off my monday morning (which is already a bit grey and dull and generally blustery and march-ish) on the right foot. and making it slightly difficult to see what today's #100happydays post should be.

* * *

words matter. expat? just another term of white privilege? yup.

* * *

would love to see this exhibition of native plains art at the met.

* * *

a danish sexologist thinks porn should be taught in the classroom.
i've been in denmark long enough to agree.
and my child is actually in the target age group.

* * *

check out the putin's missing clock.
i love the internet.

* * *

this may be advice for young writers,
but i think it applies to old ones as well.
and to humans in general.

"Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience."

wouldn't it be cool to...

wouldn't it be cool...

...to create an art scavenger hunt (or maybe a lego scavenger hunt!).

...to have a folding bicycle.

...to revive theosophy. (or maybe i should just reread bulgakov while gazing up occasionally at a kandinsky in order to synthesize my logical and mystical knowledge.)

...to go to this exhibition of the works of hilma of klint at louisiana. (i was inspired by this article (for which you'll need to read danish).) (i'm linking to it mostly so i can find it again.)

...to look for moments of happiness every day and blog about it for 100 days like judith, james, isaac and rebecca? (well, to be fair, i haven't seen any posts written by rebecca, but she is only 9 months old, so i suppose that's fair enough.)

...to find mr. burns and complete my simpsons minifigures collection?

...if a bearded drag queen won the eurovision song contest? (oh wait, that happened.)

...to host a pecha kucha evening?

...get a good nights' sleep unmarred by dreams of horses retaining water, or falls from a 4 meter tall structure while sitting on a pallet or cats demanding to come in or out the bedroom window (that last bit isn't so much a dream as reality).

and on that note, i'll leave you to think of all the things you think would be cool...

what does a creative workspace look like?

i've been pondering what makes the physical surroundings of a workspace creative. because it strikes me that just filling it with creative people doesn't necessarily do the trick. i've been pondering this for awhile and have collected quite a lot of inspiration on a couple of pinterest boards - kulturhus and stationen (co-working). interestingly, some of the first photos i pinned were of a workspace in LEGO's project house, several years before i ever started working there. the space looks amazing - with light, open spaces, bright colors and even includes a slide.

it's a light, bright open space and you can look down upon it from above. but even in most of the photos, there aren't any people working in the space (that could, i grant, be because the photos were purposely taken when hardly anyone was around). the photos represent a common area, and what they don't show is that they are surrounded by a traditional open workspace filled with normal office desks (which can raise and lower, of course). they also don't show the noise factor and the fact that if anyone actually uses the slide, it's quite disturbing to those working around it.

there are small meeting rooms overlooking the space. this meeting room, while colorful and (of course) filled with danish designer furniture (arne jacobsen 7 chairs and a peit hein super ellipse table), looks pretty small and cramped to me. and what about the distraction of looking down on the bustling workspace below or having those below be able to look up? does that promote or hinder creativity?

the cabinets there are filled with LEGO in all sorts of shapes, colors and sizes where the designers go to get the materials of their creativity. these cabinets are found in many areas around the company and there is something delightful about having all of those creative materials at hand.

this couch looks inviting and like a great place for an informal sparring session or impromptu chat. however, it's right above the big space below and it feels like everyone would be able to hear your conversation. this could be bad if you're discussing something confidential, but it could just also be quite disturbing to those trying to work below. especially as conversations in LEGO can take place in many different languages.

and stepping back a little bit, you can see that there's another informal workspace, just beside this couch, where it's even more obvious that the spaces are potentially more disruptive to work than facilitating it.

interestingly, every aspect of this area was thoroughly thought-through and deemed to be very creative and to promote creativity. all of the intentions were in place. but, in my opinion, it just doesn't work. it's too open, too many desk-laden areas are adjacent and it's too disruptive to getting work done. but i don't necessarily have any answers as to what would be better. i have an intuition that it involves getting rid of outlook and powerpoint as the main tools of people's work. and i also have an idea that it doesn't involve big, open spaces, but little, enclosed cavelike ones, to which people can retreat and do solitary, intensive work and then re-emerge and engage with others. i'm not sure precisely what that looks like. but i'm pretty sure it doesn't involve noise-canceling headphones for the entire department.

i suspect similar amazing-looking, well-intentioned spaces at google and various co-working places are equally not conducive to creativity.

i've got this book, on the evolution of workspaces, on my order list.  and after i published this, i came across this article on how etsy tackles the problem. and then i came across this one, which i think has some great ideas.

what do you think an ideal creative workspace would look like?

tho' it's totally unlike me to use someone else's photos, i did in this post. all photos came from here. 

flea market finds

this year's flea market was a bit disappointing. there wasn't any good 70s pottery and when i first went, it was so crowded that it was actually downright unpleasant. but here and there, in between, i managed to find a few treasures. like this embroidered mormor (grandma) pillow with a fine rooster on it. 

i spotted these tiny houses in amongst a bunch of plates and cups that i wouldn't want. they were probably made by some child in school, but i love them.

the guy said i could give 5 kroner for both, but i felt badly about that, so i gave 5 kroner each (about $1). the money does, after all, go to the local scouts.

these will go nicely on my tiny houses board on pinterest (which is part of why i've posted so many photos of them here).

i do wish the child who made them had signed them. that would make them even nicer.

i also found this little teal blue typewriter for just 50 kroner. the blue is much better than it looks in this photos. i've not tried it yet, but i shall.

i had to have this sweet little red enamel bowl - it will be a perfect berry picking bowl. it says made in yugoslavia on the bottom, which makes it even more charming in my book.

tobias approves of the new chicken pillow. or maybe it's just that i put it in his favorite chair.

* * *

i love this little article about unusable words.

* * *

and how about an imaginary world encyclopedia that is unreadable?

* * *

and speaking of books, reading this article makes me long to have lived in another time.

creativity and co-creation

this morning an article with the shocking headline of ted talks are lying to you caught my eye. my initial thought was, "say it isn't so!" but then i remembered that brené brown drivel on which i once spent 20 minutes of my life that i'll never have back. brené - what kind of a pretentious crap name is that? but thomas frank lays out a pretty good case for the pop phenomenon of self-help/business books on the topic of creativity. they're formulaic (like most business books), they're filled with the same stories (invention of the post-it with a few bob dylan lyrics thrown in) and they're not really about creativity at all, but about conformity and societal norms. and that made a lot of sense to me. because i've experienced myself how truly thinking outside the box will get you thrown out of the club, because what people really want is to be surrounded by people who think as they do, not by people who push them to think differently and behave in new ways.

it's an interesting read and it makes a lot of sense to me and articulates the aversion i've found that i have for books on cultivating creativity, without really knowing why i found myself rolling my eyes at them. what he doesn't go into is something i've been pondering of late and that's whether it's even possible to be truly creative and think outside of the box (i hate that phrase)? i'm beginning to think that creativity has much more to do with regular, even dogged, practice than it has to do with any epiphanies. the possibility of developing something unique and which is truly yours or truly an expression of what you'd like to, well, express, is nearly null. anything we make is somehow a conglomeration of influences and experiences and contains grains of them all, rather than being something completely new and unique. even a post it is really just weak tape and a small piece of paper, it's not anything new.

but that said, i do believe in a creative practice, tho' i admit that i do it myself in fits and starts and not very consistently. and i believe in the power of co-creation - where a group of people from different, seemingly diverse fields, come together and put their ideas into one big pot, where they are stirred together and become new and improved ideas. and i'd say that one of my main talents lies in an ability to put such groups together and have magic come of it. but it's unpredictable and the magic is always, always different than you imagined it would be. that's actually the magical thing about magic. to co-create ideas with other people also means being very open and willing to throw an idea into the mix and see it change and morph and become something else that only carries a kernel of what it originally was. and it's there that a lot of people have problems. they're not willing to let go of their precious baby ideas and really let them outside of their original box. i think that's where the dogged persistence and the actual nitty, gritty work come in. you have to keep going and pushing and seeing what happens. just like in real life.

and ultimately, it's why i still think ted talks are a good thing - ideas are floated into the world, consumed by people, who combine them with their own ideas and they become something else entirely. life, it's an act of co-creation.

* * *

always pondering libraries, so i liked this guardian piece by neil gaiman.

* * *

fantastic photos and stories of a forgotten russia.

an assortment of bottled-up thoughts

an assortment of bottled-up thoughts are tumbling through my head after a weekend of mad amounts of cooking (on saturday, i made chutney, pickles, raspberry jam, bread, ricotta, lasagne, garlic mushrooms which i picked myself in our forest and a plum cake). i did it all while watching doctor who on netflix (except the walk in the woods to pick mushrooms, i took a break then). i'm not sure i'm fully onboard with the doctor. there are a few too many zombies and crude robots with funny voices for my taste. it leaves it seeming a bit cheesy in a way that becomes tiresome after awhile. so today, while patching up all of husband's work jeans and shorts, i went over to the spinoff - torchwood. i think it's a bit more up my alley. but how great is netflix? what did we do before we had it?

* * *

i'm pondering ways of displaying my minifigure collection. i think i need a new typecase drawer, as i don't want to use the "official" display cases made by lego. i wanted husband to make me a little shelf that goes all the way around the ceiling, but he's not really that keen on the minifigure collection. something about plastic junk we don't need that i tuned out. there are worse things i could collect. shrunken heads, for example. or human teeth. or toenail clippings. it could be much, much worse.

* * *

this morning, a friend on facebook posted this piece on the power of language and the power of appropriating someone else's terminology (e.g. racism) and i found myself thinking about it all day. i've had racism on the brain of late, as i look around at denmark and find it becoming increasingly racist (just check out this proof). i've also been uncomfortable using that term, as i feel it's reserved for the black vs. white discussion and have hesitated to appropriate it more broadly. in the danish context, it's less about skin color and more about general xenophobia - fear of The Other, many of whom are as white as the danes. i've wondered if racism as a term really applies. but when considered in terms of power, oppression and privilege, it is in many ways racism which is on the rise in denmark. and if we don't use that stark terminology to point it out, we contribute to allowing it to happen (remember what happened last century when no one spoke up against a little moustached fellow named hitler?).

i do realize that this isn't what the ambiguously-gendered jamie of the article is saying - s/he's saying that outside of the black-white context, we shouldn't go bandying around the word "racism." but i think we not only should, we need to (tho' i agree with the examples given that it is a misuse of the word on the part of a bunch of whiners who have been slighted by someone). because racism needs to be stopped and it needs to be said, out loud, that it's not ok. 

oh, and i completely disagree with jamie that anyone's mind will ever be changed by a discussion on facebook.

* * *

a month or so ago, i came across a reference to ray bradbury's zen in the art of writing and ordered it from the library. i've not read any bradbury before (perhaps the odd short story back in school), but it is absolutely uncanny how i keep running across him all of a sudden. zen in the art of writing is a marvelous little book and i've got to own it, not just have it from the lbirary, it won't do to be without it. i am already making lists of nouns as he advises and can't wait to see what kind of stories come out when i sit down to use them.

then, on friday, i came across this spoken word piece by corin raymond and who does he refer to but ray bradbury? it's an hour long, but very much worth it. play it in the background while you're cooking or ironing or sewing or painting, it's about listening to it anyway. after listening, i ordered fahrenheit 451 and dandelion wine from the library. how can i have gone this long without reading them?

and then just now, i sat down with infinite perspectives, a book on the history of mapmaking. and who do you think wrote the foreword? ray bradbury. 

this can't be a coincidence. 

* * *

amazing albanian women who have lived as men for their whole lives.

when no one was home

i read an article yesterday on the nytimes (when it's online it's on not in, right?). it was about how people who have a lot of family stories and a good sense of their family stories are better at coping both with tragedy and with life in general. and it made me think about sabin's craving for stories. every night at bedtime, she wants a horse story or a cat story or a childhood story. and sometimes no stories come to me, but often they do. stories of runaway ponies and broken carts, races up the second row of trees in the shelter belt when the trees were small, stories of first trophies and first place plaques in obscene quantities or that time that we decided when no one was home to teach switch, our calm paint gelding, to drive. we harnessed him up, made him pull a tire once around the driveway and then just hitched him up to the cart and went for a ride. or the other time when no one was home and we let elvira (a goat) in the house and she trimmed all the plants on the front porch. or the other time no one was home and there was a tornado warning and we brought skip's galley lad (a horse) into the basement. and i say "we" to implicate my sister, but i was nearly six years older and probably should start to take responsibility now. tho' that decision to drive her friend home in the chevette at the age of 12 (because no one was home...hmm, that was apparently a theme) is all on her shoulders, as i was off at college by then.

family stories fill our lives. dad's watermelons in the trees one hot summer, tales of warming his feet in a fresh cowpie as he walked to school barefoot on a frosty morning, or that time the old horse dumped him off into the water tank. or was that uncle red? and don't forget the disassembled ball point pen that got him into so much trouble he never picked up a tool again.

husband remembers at about the age of 4, riding his tricycle down to the harbor where ferries were coming in and out all the time and putting the trike up along the heavy beam, right at harbor's edge and careening as fast as he could along the water, precariously balanced and gripping the handlebars of his tricycle. he also remembers being spanked for it and going right back and doing it again.

we are a most complex sum of our stories and we are constantly adding new ones to the equation of our lives. and to think that they enable us to cope makes so much sense. i wonder if, in the contexts where there are no stories, it's there that things go wrong. there where the stories are separate and not shared, hoarded and even concealed. because stories need to be told, to take on the warmth and life of those who tell and those who hear them. imagine what stories are just waiting to be told.

deciding to be happy

pretty happy things inspired by pinterest

yesterday at the end of my blog post, i linked to an article about how it pays to be happy. and how you can simply decide to be happy, you just have to keep at it for 21 days (they say that's what it takes to make something a habit, tho' don't ask me who they are). i think what keeps going through my head is the line about: if you're positive, your brain is 31 percent more productive than it is in a negative state. honestly, i need all the productivity i can get, so i'm thinking it's worth a try to be positive and happy. 

last night, we had some car trouble that totally turned our plans upside down - we thought we'd be spending our evening in a nice restaurant in another country, eating and laughing with friends after laying in 3-4 months' supply of nutella and gin at a well-stocked german grocery store. when we got to the parking lot of the grocery store, our car began acting up (electrical problems), so we decided to high-tail it back to denmark, where our falck membership was valid and we could call a tow truck if necessary. (i ran in for nutella and gin before we departed, don't worry.) 

we called our friends to cancel and decided instead to go to their place (which was in denmark), where we ended up having an impromptu dinner and playing a great board game called ticket to ride (which i promptly ordered from amazon during the game) and laughing and having a great time anyway. we left around midnight and the car seemed ok. but along the highway, it came to a stop and we had to call falck after all. 

during the wait for the tow truck, we were beside the dark highway and cars sped past us. one truck actually honked as if we were in the way. and i found myself getting absolutely furious about the danish mentality of "we gave at the office, you're on your own." yes, it was dark, yes it was rainy and yes, help was on its way, but still, it would have been nice if someone had demonstrated courtesy and a shred of caring about others and stopped to ask if we needed help. i complained on facebook and my friends started piping in with commiserations and offers of help (from seattle!) and ideas (involving flashing my chest) for getting someone to stop. and it made me laugh and i felt a whole lot better. so i guess i feel i had proof that deciding to think it was funny instead of being furious actually worked. happiness won. (even if it was with a bit of help from my friends.)

i think i'm going to give it a whirl as an experiment over the next few weeks, following some of the advice from the article:

~ write down three new things you are grateful for each day
~ spend two minutes a day, writing all the details about a positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours
~ exercise or do something you enjoy for at least ten minutes a day
~ write one quick email, first thing in the morning, thanking or praising someone who's in your social support network

i know, it all sounds a bit new agey, but isn't it worth a try?

happy birthday, dad!

a big happy birthday to my dad!
he's a bit older today than he was in this photo (circa 1977).

this was back in the era when he proposed that the fence post should be the state tree of south dakota.
sadly, it didn't pass.

i also recall a bet paid in pennies on that very desk on the floor of the house.
it was some mound of pennies.

happy birthday, dad.

* * *

is food a narrative medium?
here's another opinion on the subject.

* * *

wine talk - it's so pretentious, but there's also something to it - thinking deeply about pleasure.

* * *

i have long wished that i was alive and in my prime in 1913.

(who knows, maybe i was?)

here's just another confirmation that it was The Year.

at least where art and culture were concerned.

i wonder if 2013 has the same potential?

somehow i doubt it.

* * *

so many people in the world with such amazing stories.

like bryan saunders, who has drawn 8700 self-portraits - some while on various drugs.

i wasn't sure whether to be in awe or horrified.

* * *

the v board on pinterest: of course it's vikings.

shoplift lit list

in one of those long, convoluted series of clicks, i stumbled upon a rather old (1999! - so last century) article from the new york observer by ron rosenbaum. it's about which books reside in the shoplifting section of a barnes & noble in NYC - they're on a special shelf where you have to ask the cashiers for them, because they are stolen so often that it's a problem for the store. the article is clever and witty and you should go read it, especially since i'm not going to go into the whole thing here.

what i am going to go into is my own personal list of books that i consider so essential that i would risk the incredible stupidity that is shoplifting to own them. but only if, for some bizarre reason, i had no other choice. i should note that i am actually really opposed to shoplifting and think it's a lame and not very nice thing to do, so i am in no way advocating the shoplifting of these or any other book (or makeup or trinkets or hair thingies or socks or razor blades (which are apparently the most shop-lifted item) or anything else). and really, what with libraries, we should, in theory, never have to shoplift any books at all. however, i will still make the list. because i love lists. and since now i've been going on and on about it for this long...

~ charlotte's web by e.b. white.  this classic has made countless children cry themselves to sleep.

~ little women by louisa may alcott. if i were one of the little women, i'd be jo (wouldn't we all?).

~ brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky. i would not only shoplift this book, but if i was allowed only one book in the universe, ever again, 'til the end of my life, this would be the one. it has it all...god, the devil, patricide, crazy brothers, saintly brothers, intellectuals, philosophy, religion and the grand inquisitor.

~ the bean trees by barbara kingsolver. i read this for the first time when i was in macedonia and it transports me there in a good way. tho' the book has nothing whatsoever to do with macedonia.

~ murakami - pretty much anything he's written, tho' especially wind-up bird chronicle and hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. 

it occurs to me that in a way, this is just a list of favorite books, but somehow, the shoplifting twist changes it a bit for me. it's not only favorites, but books you'd be willing to sacrifice yourself for, or encounter danger (sort of) for. books for which you'd take a risk. and that somehow seems different than mere favorites. tho' they are that as well.

what book(s) would make you turn to a life of crime?

just a man singing to his pig head

it's kind of funny that i actually read this article on why classical music is awful AFTER sunday's opera café at our local kulturhus (culture house - it somehow sounds weird in english). but i do think that richard dare is definitely onto something.

classical music - orchestras, opera, even ballet - have built up such a veil of snobbery around them, that i think that many people find them inaccessible. i know that's what i heard around our little town when it was announced that there would be an opera café - featuring excerpts from henry purcell's dido & aeneas and bach's coffee cantata, performed by professional musicians from one of the nearby academies.  i'll admit i even thought it myself when the group said they were going to sponsor an opera arrangement. i thought it was very brave to find an audience for an afternoon of opera in a little town of 3500 farmers.

i've seen quite a lot of opera (and ballet) in my day, mostly because it was on nearly every night at the operahouse in kazan when i studied there. tickets were incredibly cheap and my friends and i went all the time - it was fun to see the costumes, the artists were high quality (it was only a couple years after the fall of the soviet union and in the very theatre that produced nureyev) and they had great georgian champagne for pennies during the pause. even there, tho', people got dressed up in their best clothes (whether they went together or not) and followed some unspoken norms of when to clap and when not to that i'm not sure i ever entirely understood being the cultureless american i was (Q:  what's the difference between americans and yogurt? A:  yogurt has culture).

and now back to our regularly-scheduled topic....why does it have to be that way? so stiff and proper. opera is full of high drama, emotions and yes, even comedy (seriously, are you not amused by this man and his pig?), so why shouldn't we clap with delight and laugh when it's funny? it's what was great about our sunday afternoon opera arrangement  - that it being out here in the boonies, on a makeshift stage in the former lobby of the local city hall meant that none of us quite knew how to behave. we didn't quite clap at the right times and tho' we didn't entirely let ourselves go and really enjoy it out loud, we came close.

opera served up in an intimate space, with the whole room as the stage, not separating audience and performers, and even a bit of audience participation here and there, went a long way towards breaking the boring, stiff barrier around classical music. we did it quite instinctively, without a lot of academic overanalysis, but i think we're on the right track.

on waking up with a headache and not having it ruin your day

i woke up with a headache.
outside there was a steady, grey drizzle.

you'd think that would make a girl want to bury her head under the covers.

and it did.

but the animals were depending on me.
so i went outside.
and tho' it was raining, the air was FULL of birdsong.
and it was quite warm. and still.
and beautiful.

the chickens clucked a greeting and got busy pecking around for tasty morsels.
the bunnies stood on their little back legs to say hello.
the horses nickered good morning.

and my headache began to fade.
and i knew it would be a good day after all.

* * *

if you read nothing else today, read this. lidewij edelkoort is more than just a trend forecaster, she's one smart, thoughtful woman. take what she says about politics today:

The word "intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress. Does fashion have a political role? And in which way?

It might. It should. It would, if politics mattered. The current disapproval of what politics are makes it pretty difficult to discuss. What we discuss today is the need for another political engagement and another political possibility. We need first to admit the end of this era, and start reflecting about the new one. Fashion could do that. It does it in the sense that it reflects on what is regional. I believe that the regional is going to be a major influence in coming politics.

while i'm not certain i find comfort in that statement (look what regionalism did in the balkans), it is definitely food for thought.

* * *

happy weekend, one and all.

it is a strange and wonderful universe

i read this op-ed piece in the LATimes the other day. it's written by a professor from arizona state (one of my many alma maters or is it almas mater?).  it's an editorial piece about science and the universe and particle physics and quantum mechanics and a little bit about religion - so light reading. it's not too long, so it's worth popping over and reading it.

as i am wont to do, i've been thinking a lot about it and i even shared it on facebook. as much as i loathe facebook (way more than google, but slightly less than flickr), it is a good place for discussion of such things. one of my friends said this: "Very interesting. We come from nothing... and return to nothing. Confirmation of such will only strengthen blind belief in God - simply because the idea of nothingness is just too enormous and unbearable. IMHO." my initial response to that was, "sad, but undoubtedly true." but it haunted me a little bit.

why is the idea of nothingness too enormous and unbearable? because we have constructed it as such, not because it actually IS too enormous and unbearable. doesn't the notion that we are hurling through a universe of ever-receding and ever-expanding, intangible nothingness actually match very nicely a feeling that occasionally nags us from somewhere deep inside anyway?  to try to explain it through some divine creator lets us off the hook in a way that i don't think is proving to be good for us or for the planet.

i am actually comforted by the notion that the universe could have spontaneously been created out of nothing due to some uncertainty principle. this, for me, fits with life in general - everything is uncertain, as much as we try our best to control it. to know that there is an actual uncertainty principle at work explains a lot.  and i don't find at all that it makes life meaningless or purposeless - on the contrary, it seems that more than ever, life is precisely what we make of it.

what is an ideal family anyway?

this was the front page of our newspaper on friday. the headline says "career society's new ideal family" - and i "read" the photo as one of a filipino nanny seeing to the children and family dog, with absent parents.  but the article itself turned out to be far more cynical than that.

it seems that of the 5,149 fertility treatments in denmark in 2010, 3,249 were women who were not in a relationship with a man. that means 2/3 of the fertility treatments in this country are performed on single or lesbian women. 13% of these treatments result in a child, so some 400 children were born to single or lesbian mothers. the article didn't dig down into how many of these were in a lesbian relationship and how many were just women whose biological clock was ticking with no partner in sight. it also didn't include those who might have been inseminated abroad or without the help of a clinic. but the numbers are interesting.

leaving aside the question of lesbian couples who are having children (which i am totally cool with and which wasn't the focus of the article), it seems that there are increasing numbers of women in denmark who are choosing to have a child on their own. the article indicated that they are often well-established career women who simply feel they don't have time for career, relationship and children, so they are choosing children and career and making a conscious decision to forego a relationship with the child's father, or to even bother to find a father for their child other than in a test tube.

in fact, there are actually people selling coaching services and so-called decision workshops and donor sperm workshops and networking groups for this type of woman. it seems that for many of these women, their biggest worry isn't that the child will grow up without two parents, but that having a child will devalue them in the workplace. really? this is seriously the most cynical view on the world i've read in a long time. it frightens me to think of what the individualistic, me-me-me, egotistical way of living today is doing to our world. i realize this sounds rather anti-feminist of me, but i cannot believe that not a word of an article that stretched over two full pages of my newspaper, questioned whether or not it's the best thing for the child to grow up with a single parent? especially one that the article cites as particularly career-minded.

the good news is that today's workplace and way of working allows for a single parent model - no one in denmark (except foreigners) will look askance at you for leaving at 3 to pick up your child. it's assumed that you'll get back online in the evening and tend your mails after you've put the child to bed, so single mothers can make it work to have both career and child. both the technology and the view on work support this model.  and that undoubtedly helps two-parent families just as much, so i'm good with that.

however, the article actually says outright that many women are choosing to divorce because they feel they only have time for their child and their job, but not the husband. that way, they also can work very hard every other week, when the partner has the kids. according to one mercuri urval recruitment consultant interviewed for the article, employers look upon this type of dedicated-every-other-week employee very favorably.

i'm not sure whether the article was meant as a provocation, but i feel provoked by it. i'm not against anyone who has the means - economically and mentally - having children, whether they're in a relationship or not, but that the impact on the child itself is not even covered in the article provokes me. there wasn't a single reason to do so outlined in the article that wasn't incredibly self-absorbed on the part of the single woman.

i think having children is really hard. at times i'm overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility i feel and the energy it takes and the state of world we've brought our child into. i would definitely not want to be doing it on my own. but it's also extremely rewarding and some of my happiest moments are spent with the amazing child that we're raising. but again, i wouldn't want not to share that with her father. i just don't think it's meant to be something we do alone, for our own selfish reasons.

maybe i'm just not a feminist.

on the guardian and immigrants and words and passive aggressive status updates

whenever i don't blog for a few days, i end up feeling intensely bottled up with all kinds of small, unrelated thoughts. luckily, the genre of blog lends itself well to that.  it's dreary and a bit cold out this morning, so i feel justified in staying tucked up in bed with the laptop and a big mug of tea (which husband just delivered to me), and getting all those niggling little thoughts out onto the page.

i read an article in the guardian about the food revolution and all those celebrity chefs like jamie oliver and nigella lawson, who claim to be down-to-earth, but actually have full-time gardeners and housekeepers that enable them to live their "normal" lives. class warfare (bitterness?) is rife in the article and i'm on the whole unconvinced by the arguments, tho' glaser makes some interesting points. i turn to nigella and jamie's cookbooks time and again and don't find them the least inaccessible to either my daily cooking needs nor the everyday shelves of my grocery stores. it strikes me as a classic case of trying to make a mountain of a molehill. and at the end, it's apparent she's trying to sell her own book, which is precisely what she denigrates jamie and nigella for doing. hmm....

* * *

i got a large photography book from the library yesterday. i wasn't looking for it and just happened past it on a shelf. a photographer named henrik saxgren went around scandinavia photographing immigrants. the book, published in 2006, is called krig og kærlighed - om indvandringen i norden (war and love - on immigration in the north). immigrants were photographed in their homes in norway, denmark, finland, iceland and sweden. he also photographed the camps where asylum-seekers are housed in each country. those make for some very stark photos. and the stories are even starker. i'm not finished with the book (page 104 of 266) and already i feel haunted by many of the stories. long hours in fish processing plants in harsh conditions seems to be a regular theme. not all of the stories are of immigrants fleeing war and strife in their own countries, but there are also tales of love. another recurring theme is men who were lured to scandinavia by tall, beautiful, blonde girls, only to be left stranded by them when the dream bubble burst. unable to go once the fires of love go out because they don't want to leave their children behind, they're left without network or love. i remarked to husband that the same could happen to me, but he just brought me a second cup of tea, so it looks like i'm good for the moment.

* * *

last evening, i got bored on pinterest.

* * *

i was reading blogs yesterday afternoon and i am struck by how often people misuse their/they're/there, it's/its, lay/lie, your/you're. and how often those same people are also homeschooling their children.

* * *

and speaking of words, sewist/sewer/seamstress is causing a big stir and even a follow-up over at the craftsy blog. personally, i hate the word sewist - it sounds made-up and pretentious. seamstress has the weight of tradition behind it and carries a continuity with a historical line of amazing women who sew. and sewer, well, i think that rules itself out in how easily it can be misunderstood as pipes carrying poo.

* * *

in other word-related thoughts, extranjera and i had a little discussion on facebook on friday after i used the danish word mindrebegavede. it is basically the word for retarded, but to my ear, expresses it more delicately - lesser gifted (if i translate literally). i had just heard a tween use the very local colloquial "ik' aw" about 25 times in the course of a 2-minute story. this is the equivalent of ending every phrase with "like, ya know?" and does, in fact, make the speaker sound, well, lesser gifted. so instead of screaming, i put up a little passive aggressive status update on facebook. because if facebook is for nothing else, it is THE place to get all of your passive aggressions out of your system.

* * *

and on that note, i think i'll wander off and find something productive to do. like change around the dining room.  happy sunday, one and all.

orthogonality and good craic

i read an article about the santa fe institute that has me once again, in fits of longing for intellectual company. founded back in the 80s, they have created an intellectual environment par excellence. they have a number of scientists, researchers and humanists in residence at all times and every conversation that takes place must be an interesting one. their founding premise is "that intellectual vitality arises from people interacting across a wide range of disciplines." they have even coined a term for it: orthogonality.

i think i have long known the value of orthogonality and even used it in my work - there is great value in bringing together people who don't look on the surface like they have much in common and seeing what kind of sparks fly. i've had quite a lot of workshops where people were skeptical of the group i brought together - from ship captains to cartoonists to flash developers to learning specialists to gospel singers - but sparks always flew and magic ALWAYS happened. so there IS something to orthogonality.

in the article, novelist cormac mccarthy, who spends a lot of time at the SFI, says he does so because of the "good craic." that's another thing i'm craving - good craic. craic is a gaelic word meaning lively chat or conversation. husband and i have great conversations on a daily basis, but it would be nice to have some others, some fresh blood, so to speak. let's face it, after 15 years of knowing one another and having these discussions, husband and i are pretty much on the same page.

a friend sent me an email about a conversation group she started - it features wine (always a plus) and meets approximately monthly. each member submits an article that the other members read and then they get together and discuss over a glass or two of wine - sort of like a book club. hers is more career/business-oriented, whereas i think i'm looking for something quite philosophical. it doesn't need to be a formal think tank or have fellowships and high-powered macarthur grant recipients like they have in santa fe - i just need intellectual stimulation and input. good craic.