vocation or calling?

i had a good bit of craic yesterday with a friend on the topic of finding one's vocation. vocation, that's a big word, isn't it? sure a guy like the pope or someone like mother theresa has a vocation, or a calling, but an everyday person? hmm, i wonder if we modern humans find our vocation these days. or if we don't flit too much from one thing to another with our short attention spans to take the time to find out what our vocation might be. would we even recognize our vocation if we saw it? or are we too busy looking to the next thing to even notice it?

i've had moments of feeling that i found my vocation - but what i think they really may have been were moments of flow.  intense concentration in a library, writing when the hours melt away, the words just come and you look up and can't believe how much time has passed. sewing the seams of a quilt. flurries of productivity on a long-haul flight. giving a presentation where you're suddenly aware that it's going well and you can kind of stand apart from yourself and watch. but does it all add up to a vocation? so far, it hasn't, as i'm still not sure what i want to be when i grow up. i've ruled out a few things (after trying some of them for far too long), but the field is still pretty wide open. i'm trying to learn to place myself in those situations where i will feel that feeling of flow, because a vocation has to be related to that. but i think it's hard to sustain.

have you found your vocation? did you follow it? do you even think it exists outside of the vatican?

standing apart from the crowd

the coolest new zealander i know, stacey (remember discounderworld and shoe per diem - those are her brainchildren), has a new blog to go with her new job and already she's making me think. this morning, i read her post on the word entrepreneur and found myself nodding.  as you know, i often ponder language,  and stacey's thoughts on entrepreneur not really being the right word for someone who is starting a little business had actually occurred to me of late.

entrepreneur seems to be a whole lot bigger than small business owner. and while i admire anyone who has their own little company, whether they be a plumber or electrician or specialize in communications in english, there is somehow a difference between daring to go out on your own with a small business and true entrepreneurship. i find entrepreneur as word laden with the notion of a unique invention or The Next Big Thing. i find it interesting stacey also associates it with time and how you as an entrepreneur build up your business in order to spend less time at it, so you can move on to the next thing. i would actually call that investment, rather than entrepreneurship, but i find the thought interesting.

in danish, there is another word for entrepreneur - iværksætter. literally - one who sets work in motion - i like that, as it feels to me like it applies better to the business i'm setting in motion. we've not invented a smart new wheel or the answer to twitter or a truly good battery for storing wind power (whoever invents that will be rich) - we're providing high quality communication services in english for other iværksætter in denmark, who want to grow their businesses globally. and iværksætter seems like the perfect word for it. i guess that's the advantage of living in two languages, you can take the best words from both to express what you would really like to express.

it strikes me as i think about entrepreneurship and read advice about it (and there's a LOT of advice out there), that it's all glowingly positive, evangelistic and rather cheerleader-y. i'm slightly disappointed that no one really talks about all of the fear and night terrors associated with it. because while it's exciting, it's also a tremendous amount of pressure to place on yourself - because the success or failure is all on you - there's no one to blame. and whether or not you get a new kitchen anytime in the near future may be resting entirely on you. 

reflecting on language

i find myself thinking a lot about language this week. language gets a lot of abuse from a lot of different angles. but it is especially abused by non-native speakers, who tend to assign new meanings to words that already had a perfectly good meaning assigned to them already. and if you happened to know that original meaning, you can be left feeling mightily confused. especially if the new meaning has no apparent connection to the original, ostensibly real, one.

but i say ostensibly real, because that's the thing about language - it's pretty arbitrary. why chair means chair and not table is because we've all more or less agreed upon that. but the chair i see in my head when you say chair and the chair you see in your head may be quite different. my generic chair is a lot like this one:



but, because of the way language functions, we more or less agree that a chair is something you can sit on and then there are variations from there and so we all understand the gist of it when we say "chair."

and i don't just mean neologisms, where someone makes up an entirely new word - like sustainovation (a combination of sustainability and innovation), but what if the meaning given to a word, like say, "quota," is very different from any you've experienced. to me a quota is a quantative amount that one tries to meet. it is not another name for your vacation days. so if you encounter quota in the sense of vacation days, you are left feeling a bit bewildered. because it is bewildering to be reading along in what is ostensibly your language and suddenly you don't understand the meaning, even tho' you understand the words.

it seems that it's worse in written language than in spoken. if someone said "quota" to you to mean vacation days, you would, through expression and body language, communicate that you didn't quite get that word, or you could directly ask. there would be more understanding possible in spoken language than there is in the written word, where you are left to suss out the meaning for yourself from the context.

i suspect that entering a workplace populated by 50-some different nationalities, where the shared language is english, i'm going to be encountering lots of these little gems. of course, i've been working with non-native speakers of english for more than a decade now, so i'm rather used to it, but it seems it will be even more marked this time, with the addition of german into the mix as the predominant other language.

adding to that the fact that companies, especially very large ones, have a tendency to create their own internal language, i think this is going to be an exciting linguistic ride.

chabuduo is not good enough

dreamy orchids promote the pondering of ponderable thoughts.

on a lazy sunday afternoon, we watched some crap t.v. shows (as one does) where four "known" (kendt) danes with nothing visibly in common each take turns making dinner at their house and entertaining the other three. then, they rate one another and one of them "wins" 10,000 kroner for their favorite charity. and it struck me, as they gave one another ratings of 8 and 9 for what appeared to be quite ordinary food that likely at most deserved a 5 or 6 and referred to one another as "icons" in their fields, when none of them are even remotely approaching icon status, that reality television is wrecking the language(s) (all of them). it's evident in the talent shows as well, where the judges tell everyone they're brilliant and the best they've seen or heard, when they most decidedly were not and that was evident for all to see and hear.

what is this culture of politeness that's driving this? are we really so afraid to call a spade a spade? and what does it do to words like "icon" that they are applied to only marginally famous, deeply insecure people who can't cook or set a proper table? it strips them of meaning is what it does.

yesterday, i learned about a chinese word - chabuduo - which means "almost there" or "good enough." since i had a long drive, i began to speculate as to whether the world is becoming a place where everything is "good enough," or chabuduo, whether it really is or not. i may be thinking of chabuduo in the wrong sense here, as what's underneath the chinese conception of it is a constant search for optimization - making things easier, cheaper and getting more money for them. but maybe i haven't misunderstood, because isn't reality t.v. chabuduo as well? it's definitely easier than making a proper television show, it surely costs less as you can get loads of fame-hungry suckers to participate and you don't have to pay them and thus the production company makes more money on it.

but what are the implications if everyone chooses the easy route, or hides their mistakes, slaps on a coat of paint to cover things up, or gives mediocre efforts top marks? a superficialization (i just made that word up) of culture and a poverty of language is what it seems to be giving us. we don't have any way to express things that are truly brilliant or iconic anymore now that everything is those things, even the things that are chabuduo.

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dear blogger, please finish your tweaking of the photo uploader, it's not working at the moment and i hate having to post using html from flickr. sigh.

what we reveal when we say the things we say

sabin left this drawing lying on the stairs this morning. is it the monsters within?

ever since my harrowing adventure into the depths of hell with the social authorities on wednesday, i've been pondering language. and the ways in which we reveal so much more of ourselves than we even intend to in the vocabulary choices we make. the slip of the tongue that made a girl who was employed in the union office refer to me as "it there (den der)" instead of "her over there (hende der)" to her colleague was extremely telling of how those behind the desk really feel about all of us losers cattle unemployed folks. and i can tell you that referring to a person as den (it) in danish is quite rude. husband was shocked.

of course, i was largely thinking about what others reveal in what they say, but naturally i reveal myself too. i am definitely adverse to not belonging or any whiff of anything that makes me think that i'm not accepted. this is why the natural danish introversion towards people they don't know sometimes feels very insulting and provokes me. i feel it as a lack of acceptance of me as a person, even tho' after all these years, i know it's not really that. i can't really escape that that's how it feels to me. and it's partially because of how i choose to formulate it, even in describing it to myself.

our words shape our world. if we choose positive words, the world seems much more positive, negative words make things seem black. but we reveal our innermost thoughts and concerns with the things we express again and again, even if we're not actually speaking of those things. i'll explain what i mean by that...

the instructor on my "course" on wednesday revealed when he introduced himself that he was recently divorced and trying to sell a large house that seemed very empty during the half of the month when his children weren't there, but was the perfect size when they were. in my view, this information was totally unnecessary. what we needed to know were his name, who he worked for and maybe a bit about his qualifications/background - "i've been teaching these courses for x-years." we actually had no need for his age or marital status or to know he was having difficulty getting rid of a large house. (aside: danes always tell their age first off and in fact, i realized recently that they've trained me to do so too, because i did it when i introduced myself in our flickr 365 group! funny, because as an american, it used to shock the hell out of me when people did it. ack! i'm being assimilated!!)

but it ended up being interesting that he told us these things, because it went a long way towards explaining many of the things he said. we had a discussion of personal competences - your personal traits that make you a good employee - works well with others, smiles, helps out - you know, the kind of things that were on your kindergarten report card. throughout that discussion he dropped critical remarks again and again about how all of this was "feminine piss." it was clear that under the surface (but not very far under) he had a lot of anger and resentment towards women and anything that smacked of a  feminine mode of expression. that anger he had inside ended up more important than maintaining a professional relationship to his audience, so any political correctness or even common politeness towards half of his audience went out the window because that anger bubbled out in his vocabulary. time and again he revealed himself.

i was so taken aback by the whole experience that early yesterday morning, i wrote an email to the union, outlining my concerns about the linguistic choices made during the day and how they made me feel - i felt it was dehumanizing and demotivating to be referred to as an "unemployed welfare recipient"  again and again, not to mention being called "it," as if i were a cow or sheep. if the goal is actually to get people back to work as soon as possible, then depressing them further by constantly reminding them of their unfortunate status isn't really the right approach. everyone who entered that room on wednesday already felt badly enough about the fact that they were there - they knew they were job seekers who needed the help that's available to them in the system for (hopefully) an interim period.

the manager of the office called me mid-afternoon in response to my email and i had a long discussion with him about these linguistic choices. and how insulting it was to be called an asshole by the instructor because i had joined that union (which is a general one and actually posits itself as being founded on christian principles. HA!) and not another one for academics. he didn't know me from adam, even if he thought he was being funny, it was totally inappropriate to treat me that way. i don't know, perhaps i reminded him of the ex-wife.

we discussed the changing reality of the market and of the clientele for these courses. there are simply way more ordinary people out of work in this economic climate. and the system is still behaving as if denmark had virtual null unemployment. of course, this is partially the legislation and not the union's fault, but the way in which they relate to and communicate with their changing clientele is within their control. people have a union because they want to have a support net to fall back on when times get tough. if that support net doesn't support, but condescends, even just linguistically, then it's not serving its purpose.

a terrifying act, but not terrorism

last weekend, a 28-year-old somali man broke into the home of kurt westergaard, the political cartoonist behind the most famous of the infamous mohammed cartoons that appeared in danish newspaper jyllands posten in 2005 - you know the one which depicted mohammed with a bomb as his turban. the young man had an axe and he was bent on killing westergaard because of his cartoon. it was big news and even BBC world ran the story again and again all weekend.

the young somali didn't succeed, westergaard locked himself in his specially-secured bathroom and set off the alarm direct to the police. they were there within three minutes. the somali tried to run and threw his axe at the police, after which he was shot three times in the hand and leg to prevent him from fleeing and taken into custody. most shaken was westergaards 5-year-old granddaughter who was sitting at the table in her pajamas when the incident happened.

this is a gravely serious incident and it has everything to do with a clash of extremist islam against core western beliefs like freedom of speech. in a way, it's not unlike the fatwa against salman rushdie over the satanic verses - with fanatics of a religion against a purveyor of freedom of artistic expression.

on sunday berlingske devoted 8 pages to calling it terrorism. it is careless use of that word, begun by bush and his cronies, that has brought us to a point where it begins to feel quite meaningless. terrorism is an act of aggression against a group of innocent people - a suicide bomber in a crowded marketplace or metro, the airplanes bringing down the world trade center - those are terrorism. but an assassination attempt on an individual over a specific incident, while undoubtedly terrifying to the individuals involved, is not terrorism. and to call it such takes away meaning from true acts of terrorism.

we need to be more careful than this with the language.

language and connections

i'll admit it, since i took this photo of pretty purple chain onboard the ship last friday, i've been wracking my brain for a use for it. and then, this morning, a use for it fell into my lap. my blog friend Ju tweeted about an interesting post on raising a bilingual child on mummy do that! cartside, who i didn't know until the tweet, has assembled a wonderful collection of links to people who are blogging about raising bilingual children. you know, people like me. only strangely, it had never occurred to me to seek out blogs where people were writing about that. i've just sort of been fumbling along on my own. and i've only written about it once, over here on sabin and addie's blog. but what does any of that have to do with big-ass piece of purple chain, you ask? well, it's all about the connections, isn't it? and nothing says connection better than chains.

but this is actually about raising a bilingual child, so i'll get back to that now...

sabin is 8 and has lived her entire life in denmark. i have always spoken english to her and with her and so did her father until she started school. we discovered that she had some trouble cracking the code of reading in danish and we decided it would help her if her dad spoke danish to her a bit more often. and in all honesty, it did help.

sabin was slower to begin speaking than other children in her kindergarten, but i'm not sure we can blame that entirely on the two languages, it could very well be part of her personality, which is one in which she hangs back and observes before she jumps in. she also is a real perfectionist and doesn't want to make mistakes, so that may have been a factor as well. she wanted to be sure of herself in both languages before venturing out.

danish is difficult, in that the spelling has little or nothing discernible to do with the pronunciation, so cracking the reading code is difficult. that was surely compounded somewhat by my speaking and reading to her in english at home. and all of the english she hears on a daily basis on television and in music - because denmark doesn't dub extensively (the market's simply not large enough). we were fortunate that her school, which is a public one (not in the english sense of private), was very on top of the situation and she has had several rounds of extra reading help to help her crack the code. one of these was the fantastic reading recovery program, which completely did the trick last year. she's now reading very well in danish and using her reading strategies to quickly pick up reading in english.

and she's started to have english now at school, now that she's in the 3rd grade. it undoubtedly handicaps her a bit to be way ahead of the other kids because sometimes restrictions are placed on how much she's allowed to come forward with. for example, on the first day, the kids were asked to name the words they already knew in english. and sabin was only allowed to say two, which in my view, was fair enough. her teacher is great and super aware of sabin's needs, since she raised bilingual children herself. she's giving sabin as much extra work to keep her challenged as she seems to want, so she's not really being held back too much by the others being total beginners.

i actually don't worry that much about her ending up fluent in english, she already is from a speaking and understanding standpoint. and it's been our belief all along that she needs a native language. since she's growing up in denmark, danish is her native language.

some of the things i worry most about are cultural aspects. we do our best to give her a taste of the other half of her - american culture. and because so much of our television here is american and so much of the music and films american, she gets some taste of that. she's been the US lots of times and spent five weeks there a year ago in the summer, hanging out with her aunt and cousins, so she has also had the chance to partake of swimming lessons and T-ball and a fishing derby at the lake up close. but the fact is, she's a little danish girl and her main cultural grounding will be in denmark, regardless of what passports she carries (she has both).

i think raising a child to be bilingual is such a gift. i'm hopeful that she will inherit her father's ability to code switch flawlessly between languages and she seems to have that to an extent, tho' she sometimes does some really cute direct translation of danish words into english. and there are certain mistakes she makes consistently - like not saying "without," she only says "out" because that's how it is in danish. she doesn't understand that she also needs the "with" part of it, since that feels like the opposite to her. so she'll ask for a toast with nutella out butter.

we've been reading the junie b. jones books and junie b. makes a lot of grammar mistakes, so i keep talking to her about them, since i'm not sure she gets the nuances of that well enough and i don't want her to think that junie b. speaks correctly. so far, she seems to understand it and she just finds junie b.'s view on the world amusing, so the language doesn't matter that much.

it's interesting raising a bilingual child and my hope is that it makes her more able to understand and get along across cultures. and i think that it's really wonderful, through the miracle of the blogosphere, to have suddenly found a whole lot of other people who are thinking and writing about their challenges with raising bilingual children, too. see, you can learn things on twitter.

ten years ago...

i heard on the radio yesterday that it was ten years ago that the columbine tragedy (i was gonna link to it on wiki, but i can't really bring myself to do so) happened. i have a clear memory of standing in a little studio apt. on the north side of chicago, watching oprah talk about it with tears in her eyes. just as it did then, it feels remote from me now. i can't even relate. it's incomprehensible to me and so far from anything i can imagine. i feel for those people, but i cannot even wrap my head around it.

but what it does make me remember is that ten years ago, i was teaching a course in 20th century russian culture at the U of C. i made the mistake of proposing the course together with a fellow graduate student who was taking his exams that quarter. it was a mistake in the sense that taking your Ph.D. exams at the U of C brings you to the brink of a nervous breakdown. and by to the brink, i mean over the brink into a full blown nervous breakdown that you yourself don't notice, but everyone else does. so i ended up teaching alone, which was ok, it just wasn't what i expected.

since i lived in denmark, i also foolishly accepted my fellow graduate student's offer that i could live with him at his place, since it was only 3 months. but living together with someone who has had a nervous breakdown that he doesn't really notice himself is, to describe it lightly, not healthy, so i got my own temporary apartment on campus.

that turned out to be a good thing, because it was in that little bitty apartment, within a block of The Reg, that i learned to make risotto, which is a skill i still enjoy. tho' it took several tries. i had no t.v., which was also wonderful. i also ate a lot of paté on crackers. because that's what i imagined that a graduate student at the U of C should eat. i still haven't decided if that was true or not, but it was decidedly part of my own engagement in bourdieu's cultural capital (attempting to raise mine, undoubtedly).

as for The Reg, i spent so much time there in my study carrel, that i began to glow in the dark. (that's the standard U of C joke, since The Reg was built over the bit where they did the Manhattan Project.) but seriously, being left alone teaching a course (albeit undergraduate) at the U of C, is no small project. luckily, we had modeled it around matei calinescu's five faces of modernity, which meant that we covered modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch (my fave) and postmodernism (my REAL fave, at least at the time), which was an ingenious idea (even if i do say so myself). but my very, very favorite was sneaking in alcoholism, because of its importance in russian culture. vodka is a diminutive of the word for water, which illustrates its importance as a life force in russia and russian culture, because what is language if not the manifestation of culture?

it was both a great time and a stressful time, and i'm sorry that it took columbine to remind me of it, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. i'm grateful for the opportunity to say i taught at the U of C, it's not everybody who has done that. but i did. and so did obama. he's, of course, done a little better than i have, but i'm cool with that.

it's a funny language

having english-speaking visitors reminded me of all of those words in danish that appear quite hilarious to the native english speaker, but which have ceased to seem funny to me after ten years because i know what they mean in danish.  things like:

slutspurt - used in regard to sales in shops--it's like the final days of the sale--the final "spurt" of the sale, if you will. no sluts are actually involved (i don't think that kind of thing goes on sale).

fart plan - this is seen on ferries and at bus/train stations--it's the schedule. when i got here, i thought, whoa, the danes are even more organized than the germans!

fart kontrol - warning that there is a speed trap ahead (they're kind enough to let you know here). when i first got here, i thought it was pretty incredible that they thought they could control such things.

i fart - this just means "in motion" and can be seen in elevators. probably tho', what you think it means could happen in an elevator as well.

fagfolk - this isn't a derogatory term for homosexuals written on the side of a truck, but another way of saying professional.  a fag is a profession and it's pronounced "fay."

during my sister's recent visit, we quite literally had hours of fun laughing over these.

then, this morning, i came across this in the NYTimes and realized it could be worse, the words could actually BE in english already and you could live in places with names like crotch creek and the like. read it if you'd like a laugh.

on language and translation

my ponderings on kitsch and reading murakami have me thinking about language. and its connection to culture. do specific languages express something about their culture? can things be more precisely expressed in certain cultures/languages than in others? what does it do to the meaning behind a word to translate it? can translation at all capture the essense that's there in the original.

a word like kitsch, english has taken wholesale from german, so although without the cultural context, you may not understand it in the same way, the essence must, for the most part, still be there in the word. that is, if meaning adheres itself to words at all, which is probably a debatable question as well.

i'm, of course, reading the murakami in english translation and have a number of times along the way wondered if i'm missing something, not being able to read it in the original japanese. however, even in translation, it seems to me to be full of fresh ways of expressing things, which i have felt must come from the japanese words themselves. the translator, jay rubin, must surely have made word choices based on what he knew of both languages, since that's what the job of translation is all about. this has, for me at least in my reading, resulted in new and interesting ways of looking at things, even in english.

some examples:

"There is a kind of gap between what I think is real and what's really real."

"The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible..."

"Here in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up inside me were mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands."

"Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade."

looking at these passages i've selected, i get the feeling that these are ways of expressing thoughts i've often had on reality and memories, but couldn't actually GET to the right words to convey them. the words themselves seem simple and logical. the first one is arguably what Plato was getting at with the allegory of the cave, so it's not really a matter of the thought never having been expressed previously, it's more, for me a question of capturing it more powerfully through linguistic means. because thoughts are so fleeting and elusive, it's difficult to wrestle them into words and sentences.

in all of my travels, i am struck again and again that globalization isn't all it's cracked up to be. although we may all have access to blue jeans, we are not all the same, but i do wonder what it will do to the world that everyone increasingly speaks english? will there be a resulting poverty of meaning and expression as people muddle their own language with english? i definitely hope not.

i guess i shouldn't worry that much. most everyone in denmark speaks english and while there are many loan words--computer, business and the like, there are some things that are just expressed better in danish.

• numse - the very best danish word. it's a cute word for bum.
• skumfiduser - marshmallows.
• -agtig - a great suffix. the closest english equivalent is -ish, but that doesn't do it like -agtig does.
• offentlige - "public," as in public sector, but there's SO much more in the word than there is in the word public in english. it encompasses an entire way of dressing and decorating and behaving and even a certain kind of haircut as well. a very powerful word meaning-wise. and a word that could only have ended up so loaded with meaning in its cultural context.

oh well. who knows, perhaps my musings are all for nothing...maybe in ten years we'll all be speaking chinese or even hindi. imagine what we'll be expressing then!