influences, pastiche, fusion: thoughts on the creative process

i'm reading nicole krauss' great house. she's a marvelous writer that i only discovered this past summer when a friend lent me her novel the history of love. she's a writer of the holocaust, but at the same time very contemporary. back in the mid nineties at arizona state, i took a class called the holocaust in american literature. we didn't read anything nearly as marvelous as krauss back then (of course she hadn't written these books yet at that point as she was probably still in high school). i hope they've added her books to the syllabus, as they get at holocaust issues in a much deeper and more profound way than anything we read then (painted bird, sophie's choice, etc.). but perhaps that's a natural progression of things, as we gain more distance from the horror, it can be better and more artistically processed.

but i didn't mean to write about holocaust lit. what i meant to write about is her style - a pastiche of seemingly separate stories that intertwine at the end. because it got me thinking about how things connect. and how nearly everything is a sort of amalgamation of influences that start out separate and come together.

i think i see this fusion of influences most often in my cooking - it often contains elements from my upbringing, my travels and my surroundings. last evening, it being thanksgiving which is not (shock!) a holiday here and thus you don't have the whole day to devote to cooking like you do in the US, i found myself wanting to make a turkey anyway. since it was just an ordinary weekday dinner and with all of our ordinary obligations, i didn't have hours and hours to cook, so i bought a turkey breast. i slathered it with a purchased garlic cream cheese and topped it with a protective layer of bacon to keep it from drying out. then i asked husband and sabin to dig me some potatoes (it hasn't frozen yet, so the best storage place for them is in the ground), which we peeled and sliced and put in the oven with leeks and cream and butter for a batch of traditional danish flødekartofler (tho' not that traditional, since they don't usually contain leeks). i didn't have any sweet potato, so i baked up a butternut squash, which i served simply with butter, salt and pepper, foregoing any cloyingly sweet marshmallows or brown sugar. so in the end, it was a thanksgiving of sorts, but using both the time constraints and the ingredients i had at hand. thanksgiving enough to make me feel less sorrowful that i was far from my family on the day and yet simple enough to be made on an ordinary weeknight.

but i've been thinking about influences as well where creating is concerned. trying out stitching on felted stones ala lisa or using the photo transfer techniques i learned of from artist anne brodersen. we try out someone else's style or technique in order to get a feel for it. copying something is a way of learning, as well as a sort of homage to someone whose work you admire. such copies, i look upon as experiments and not by any means something i would put in my sadly neglected big cartel shop. they are but a step on the road towards something else, something my own, but i sense they are an essential step of sorts, even tho' i don't yet know where they're taking me.

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here's the deal, people, swatch watches from the 90s are not vintage. 

i don't give a rat's ass what etsy says.

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china's next top model?

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the d boards on pinterest: down by the lake. down on the farm. drinkie poo.

memories of light and drawings of the future

a shot from the old house - a happy memory of light

we have snow at last.
enough for building snow forts and having a snowball fight.
one that quickly dissolved into laughter.

a weekend of new friends.

a bit too much red wine.

an impromptu fish soup supper.

an afternoon at the movies with the whole family.

a 6 layer rainbow cake.

a bit of horsing around.

a new cat named pepchen.

three brown hens are now broody.
i swear they actually growl at me when i go out.
it has cut down significantly on the egg count.
but they're sitting on plastic eggs.
silly hens.
i'm oddly charmed by the whole thing.

some new plans forming.

a result of the red wine evening.

in vino veritas. 

or at least dreams.

and husband gets to indulge his inner architect.

and tho' it snowed,
and i've been wishing for that,
i'm longing for the garden.
and something green. 
i blame hugh's veg show.

here's hoping your weekend was exactly what you wished for.

i read therefore i am

spud was wittering on facebook the other day about reading. she'd been listening to a radio program where various writers talked about what reading meant to them. i wanted to immediately go and listen to the program, but i stopped myself, because i wanted to think about the question myself, without the filter of someone else's answer.

reading. i do it daily. and i don't mean all of the reading i do on a computer screen - i mean reading with an actual book in hand. i cannot fall asleep without reading at least a little bit before turning out the light. sometimes i fall asleep with a book in my hand and wake up in the middle of the night with it fallen on my chest and turn off the light. i come by this honestly, as my father does this too. i think when he wakes up to find the light on, he just reads a little bit more, where i tend to turn off the light and put down the book.

and although i can see the convenience of reading on an iPad or other device (what? there are other devices?), i still prefer the heft and solidity of an actual book in my hand. and tho' i largely read newspapers online, i do also love the sound of a turned page and the smell of a real newspaper, especially on sunday. it's strange, i have a sort of separation in my head as to what it's ok to read electronically and what has to be read as an actual book - sherlock holmes, that was just fine on the iPad, but murakami? i want to hold the actual book in my hand.

as i've admitted previously, i am unafraid to write in books. including library books, tho' i've been trying to restrain of late. it was one thing to have a dialogue in the marginalia of the books in the reg at the U of C, it's quite another to leave my musings in a book belonging to the royal library in copenhagen.

i think it's difficult to say exactly what reading gives to me - especially the reading of novels.  i suppose it's largely a way of processing the world. of coming to terms with human motivations and feelings and reactions. a means of being transported to another place and time, to witness events. to come to a deeper understanding through metaphor (think life of pi, which is one long metaphor about humans pushed to their outer limits - tho' i hate the ending of that book).  when i read jonathan franzen, i feel he has looked deep into my midwestern roots and wrung the very meaning from them, helping me to arrive at a better understanding of myself.

from the mind of a seemingly rational madman like raskolnikov to the mess of madame bovary to the prototype of brave, independent, smart girls i found in both the laura ingalls wilder books and trixie belden mysteries i read as a kid...i found the models that have shaped my understanding of the world.  i would go so far as to say that my models of the world are built of the blocks of all that i've read.

i think literature can, like theatre and art, help us to a deeper understanding of events and people and places. for example, i have a clearer picture of the tensions that still exist today between china and japan thanks to reading the novels of murakami. and my love of the russianness and the depths of the russian soul comes far more from dostoevsky, gogol and bulgakov than from putin.  perhaps my lack of much of an understanding of the world wars of the last century is because i've never really read novels that interpreted those events.

i heard on the radio the other day about a small theatre in copenhagen that's planning on staging a play based on the manifesto written by norwegian mass murderer anders breivik. even before it's been written and anyone knows what it is, there are many opinions about it. mostly outrage. but i think it's a brave thing to do. not to give voice to that cold-blooded murderer, but because art - theatre, literature, painting - is the very best means we humans have to get at an understanding of ourselves. how better to come to terms with the horror of what he did than to explore it through art?

why do you read? and what does it give you?

finding happiness

pondering happiness quite a lot in the face of the excitement of moving to the other side of the country (which admittedly is like moving from one side of wisconsin to the other and not as big as it might sound). husband is like a little kid anticipating christmas. he actually fell asleep last night with a smile on his face. he's covering reams of paper with sketches of the possibilities for renovations. we're now betting on two horses, as it were, and have given an offer on a second place, since the dog sled transport to northern canada is apparently unreliable, or else the laid back realtor hasn't actually sent a dog sled or any thing else, as we've heard nothing regarding our first offer. not being ones to wait around, husband has now talked himself (and thereby both of us) into the second place being better anyway. and he's right, there are more possibilities for ripping out everything that's there and putting it back in as we would want it.

now betting on this one as well. what's cool is that there's a lake on the property.

and although the first thing it needs is a new roof, that does afford opportunities not afforded by the other place, which recently had a new roof, although the engineering calculations surrounding that new roof are openly suspect in several places. so i think husband is right, the second property is better for us anyway. but my point actually is that even just talking about all of this is making us so happy.

leading me to think about what happiness is. it's an eternal question, isn't it? and we're eternally in search of happiness, tho' i'm not sure we always recognize it when we see it. for me, it's something different than contentment. contentment is a mild, tame form of happiness. a resting, easy thing. whereas, what i think makes us happy, makes us really tick, is having some enormous, seemingly impossible, daunting project on the horizon. i can definitely see that in husband. he's transformed and positively beaming at the prospect of this project. of course, it's also his new job that's transformed him - he was more than a little bored and frustrated at work and just going through the motions. he's looking forward to his new job, but even more, to the new house and all of the possibilities it represents.

these projects also remind me of our strengths - i can see things in my mind and he can build them. i pick colors, he paints them. in other words, i get all the fun and he does all the work. i guess i'll probably spend another summer with no kitchen, cooking on an old stove out in the yard and eating lots of salads. maybe it'll be time to try that raw diet i've long wanted to try. perhaps it will clear my mind so that i'll make good choices on all of those colors that we'll need on the walls in the new house. whichever one it ends up being. at least the waiting paralysis of last week seems to have passed and an excited, expectant happiness has stepped in to replace it. and that makes me very happy.

what made you happy this weekend?

a need for focus

kristina suggested that we do a week of blurry shots on across ø/öresund. she's so good at finding ways to get out of the doldrums brought on by a too-long and too-slowly-waning winter (in fact, she's been doing a whole series on it on her blog of late). and it's interesting how difficult i found it yesterday to go out with my lens on manual focus and allow myself to purposely take unfocused shots. of course i take shots all the time that aren't perfectly focused, but to do so intentionally is something different. at first, i had to also take every shot focused as well as the unfocused one and then i realized that was arguably a symptom of my growing obsessive compulsive disorder (put the pens back in color order, people), and so i took a whole bunch of totally unfocused shots and didn't allow myself to take a focused companion. really weird how difficult and awkward it felt at first. like any new thing, i suppose. but it got a little bit easier as i went along.

and it's interesting how this little assignment underlines exactly how i'm feeling this week - unfocused. i have so much to do that it's really quite silly. i think it's the waiting. we still don't know whether they will accept our offer (i guess the dog sled has not made it to the canadian arctic circle to ask the one party as of yet) on the house and husband's still waiting to see the nitty gritty details of his two job offers. and waiting makes you unfocused. there's so much i could and should be doing, but instead, i spend hours making mosaics of my flickr faves, drooling over heather's home on apartment therapy and stirring up a mushroom and fennel risotto. yeah, i got some laundry done, but once it's in, it requires little from me but the switch from washer to dryer. i could have been packing books or sorting out the attic, but i didn't. and i'm sure that later, when i'm pressed for time, i'll regret it.

spud and bee and blanca got together in london for mini blog camp on sunday and they had a discussion of life plans. blanca has one. spud and bee do not. i think a little bit that my lack of focus is because the life plan of moving to a farm with space for a large garden and a couple of horses that we developed over the past year is actually starting to come true. at least on the meta-level, of course, the details are to be worked out and acted upon. but once you fulfill your life plan, what's the next step? you need a new life plan to replace the old one that came true. i think the picture above is the perfect metaphor for how i feel right now. some bits in focus and some not so much. i need to get those focused bits out of the way and zero in on the fuzzy ones, developing them further. and it leaves me feeling restless and impatient.

asking what if?

what if?

...we looked at the world from a different angle?

...things just fell into place as they should?

...people got to do that which they were meant to do?

...my neck didn't hurt?

...we knew exactly what direction to go?

...beautiful things appeared, fully formed, in our imaginations?

...the snow melted and snowdrops burst forth?

...the sun shined?

...there was time for all of the important things?

...someone brought me a steaming, fragrant cup of milky, sweet tea?

...the whole house smelled of cinnamon buns?

some of these are already true and i have faith that the rest of them will be...

a binding issue

why is the hardest part to finish on a quilt the binding? i had a conversation about this recently with my friend se'lah of the necessary room. we talked about loving to quilt, but hating to bind. which actually means hating to finish, doesn't it? and why is that? because there's so much satisfaction in finishing things. so why is it that we hold ourselves back from it? is it the pleasure of the process? is it because we don't want it to be over? is it because our attention spans are short (and by our, i mean mine)? are we too easily bored in this fast-paced information age? why do we leave things unfinished?

i don't have an answer. but this evening, while watching my usual saturday evening midsomer murder, i'm going to be sewing on the binding above. i have a need to finish it. before the baby i've made it for turns 18...(hint, hint, se'lah, i'm binding my quilt!)

i am not my car

we have an ancient toyota carina - ancient being from the mid-90s. it has 400,000 odd kilometers on it and it uses the occasional (read: weekly) couplea liters of oil. it's dark, boring grey. it has 2 of 4 hubcaps and we did finally put them both on the same side so that it would at least look more or less ok from at least one side. it has no frills whatsoever. no automatic locks or windows. no power steering. but it gets us where we're going (unless we wanted to drive to italy or spain, it might not like going that far). and with car taxes at 150% in this country, we don't even consider replacing it. we have considered not having a car at all and we didn't when we lived in copenhagen, but the reality of where we live is that it would be pretty difficult to get along without a car.

i normally don't put much thought at all into the car. it's there, it serves its purpose and that's it. that's kinda how i was brought up to think about cars. my dad had a old blue chevette that he kept driving until my sister, at the age of 12 (if you recall) finally put it out of its misery. and i had to take my driver's test in that godawful giant old station wagon named lurch.  my first car was a nondescript american-made (i can't even recall the make/model) two-tone brown sedan. the first remotely cool car i had was a little green mustang named iggy that very quickly revealed that it used more oil than gas. tho' during my aberrant years in southern california i got a little car crazy (the peer pressure oh the peer pressure) due to a boyfriend who happened to have two porsches and my little gold pontiac fiero that perfectly matched my hair, i generally could seriously care less about cars.

so it wasn't until we approached the end station that it occurred to me that the blog campers were going to not only see but get into our ancient toyota so i'd better warn them since they probably were far more car people than i am. we had a laugh about it, especially since they approached from the hubcapless side (i should really have parked the other way) and it seemed even worse. but honestly, i didn't really think more about it, except to use it for comic effect in one of my post blog camp posts.

last weekend, the sister-in-law gave us a bad time about the ancient toyota. husband gazed at it mildly, as if it had only just occurred to him that it was getting rather old. because he cares even less than i do. SIL reported that some friend of hers who had met us remarked that it was quite ironic that we had multiple fancy cameras, iPods and macbooks, plus more than one nintendo DS, but we drove that old rust bucket (for the record, there's very little rust on the car, so that's not an entirely fair characterization). middle child's friend apparently had said the same thing. apparently people can't really reconcile wegner chairs, 3 macs (4 if eldest child is here) and a 42" phillips flat screen t.v. with the ancient toyota.

and it made me realize that it's all a matter of perceptions and priorities. we don't define ourselves by our car. at all. and i realize that a lot of people do and that's ok for them. it's just that we don't. which isn't to be high and mighty and all anti-materialistic, because we do define ourselves by a whole lot of other material symbols. like macs and iPods and nikons and designer chairs and pretty refrigerators. husband stubbornly holds onto a 3-year-old sony-ericsson mobile because he extends his not caring to phones (unlike me, i do obsess care about my iPhone). but don't try to take away his iPod Touch or his iPod Shuffle.

the whole car thing is really only a problem when other people, who define themselves by their car,  judge us by our car, because we're not our car. not at all.

don't fence me in

do you ever feel fenced in? trapped? stuck? penned in? locked inside a box? restless? wonder what's next? despite what a wonderful life i actually have and how much i love it most of the time, i feel this way sometimes. and this is one of those times. it has a variety of reasons. one is that the seasons are changing and that always makes me look for change on the horizon.

around here, we're talking a lot about the farm project and we've even started looking at farms. talk about change makes you restless for change, for sure. especially if you're not the world's most patient person. beginning to look at places has made it a whole lot more real, as you begin to imagine yourself in that new place and therefore you begin to have trouble picturing yourself in the place where you are.

it can happen on the career front, on the relationship front, inside of you. you just feel a need to break out, do something new. see something new. experience something new. meet new people, hear new stories. for the sake of the newness and the freshness.

i think this hits me at times when i feel the smallness of denmark closing around me. growing up on the vast prairie gives you an internal sense of vast space and room around you. and i find myself feeling restless when that internal vastness is cramped in, fenced off. i need to feel space around me and i don't think i'm feeling that right now.

at least this time, it's not accompanied by anxiety, more a strong restless feeling. a waiting. a wondering. scanning the horizon for what's next. whatever it is, i'm ready, so please hurry up already!

a little glimpse inside my head

photo credit: sabin + little pink sony cybershot, singapore

this is how my brain feels at the moment. it's shooting thoughts in every direction. it's been one of those days. tons of new input. meeting lots of new people. much laughter and storytelling over a nice dinner and a couple glasses of wine. i was seated next to a french guy, a sweet romanian girl, a charming norwegian girl and a woman from singapore. i love that my field is really, really international. and that people have so many stories to tell. tho' surprisingly few of them included ships. however, the afternoon was full of them and i realized once again that ships make my molecules hum in perfect alignment.

strangely tho', as the dinner part of the evening was ending, i found myself violating my own cardinal rule: "what are you gonna remember?" i actually turned down going along with the group of people who decided to go in search of a wine bar for the sake of the poor sad french guys who had had to settle for an australian red at dinner because i wanted to come back and write about my day. yes, blogging has in fact taken over my life. but i think it's not a bad thing.

it was a long, intense day of observations.

: : having a religion with a lot of restrictions makes life unnecessarily difficult and just seems made-up, artificial and absurd. it is, however, fascinating to watch. the extremes to which people will go not to live a so-called normal life are astonishing.

: : whoever invented the whole vision-values concept thing is an evil genius. never has so much time been devoted to so much made up crap.

: : what do we miss out on by not giving ourselves over, but holding ourselves aloof and cynical? and by we, i mean me.

: : overheard: "it's like choosing between pest and cholera." i think i'd take pest. no wait, cholera. see? it's hard.

: : i'm troubled at how worldwide perception of the word "sustainability" differs. it can make my chest constrict and my left eye twitch when i let myself, just for brief moments, take in the enormity of the gap in understanding of this notion between the various peoples of the world. in those brief moments of pure, white terror, i truly fear for the world sabin will inherit.  the planet will undoubtedly be fine, but will we?

: : shipping is the most schizophrenic combination of wildly creative innovation and stodgy conservatism. i can't think of anything else like it.

: : it strikes me as a little difficult to be a thin, neat, sockless loafer guy in shipping.

: : i've always wanted one of these in my house. not the boat, just the woman. isn't she cool? neruda had one.

what did you observe today?

odds and ends

so many things to catch up on (800+ posts in the reader--come on guys, i thought we agreed you'd take it easy while i was away!). i decided i needed one of those random lists for which i am mildly famous. and it is, after all, a monday and monday is the best day for a list. it helps clear the head for the rest of the week.

: : yesterday, i ordered MOO postcards so that i too can be a postcrossing girl. i've only requested one address so far (you can do 5 at a time), because i decided to wait for my own photo postcards, tho' that first person is going to get one of my precious collection of those cool postcards you can pick up for free in copenhagen cafés. but please hurry up MOO! and thank you to janet and spudballoo and B for inspiring me to do this too. i do love getting real mail. and i'm a sucker for peer pressure.

: : speaking of getting real mail, this latest addition to my little desktop bowl of rocks arrived today. there was also a really cool green and purple necklace with a sparkly swirl on it (sparkles to match my tiara, of course). the rocks were two smooth, polished stones and four lovely pieces of amber with a little hole drilled in them. one of them even most decidedly has an eyeball. thank you, rxbambi, for thinking of me while you were out and about. this is one of those beautiful things that happen when you put yourself out there and blog your madness, other people start enabling it! :-) thank you, dahling! i promise to get my act together and get your little reward for guessing that book (dang, was it really that long ago?!?) sent your way this week!

: : i keep forgetting to go to flickr, but when i remembered today, i had an email inviting me to contribute to a cool new project. it's called footearth and if you too like to photograph your feet or the feet of others, you can contribute too! i went and signed up and put up three foot pictures immediately. so much fun when other people recognize your obsessions and invite you to indulge them. i hope someone starts robot earth next. :-)

: : we got a new furnace last year in february and the results are in. we have cut our gas bill for the year IN HALF!! yes, they are giving us back more than $2000 because our new furnace, in combination with our wood-burning stove/fireplace, was so much more efficient we used HALF the natural gas! i am dumbfounded. and really happy we made that decision. if you're considering a new furnace and have any doubts, all i can say is GO FOR IT!

: : sabin and i are enjoying the junie b. jones books. thanks for getting us started on them, moneek.

: : after my post earlier today i learned that i really, truly have some brilliant, awesome friends in this here blogosphere.  and i am so grateful to you for your friendship. it makes me feel that i can breathe again.  and breathing is good.

she's back on that inspiration thing again

like many out there, i was inspired by the women of 3191, quietly, mindfully depicting their lives on opposite coasts. and again like many, i longed for such a project. one which would push my photography. one which would push me to be more mindful of everyday things myself. one which i would share with someone whose photography and view of the world inspired me. and i am so happy that i have found kristina and that project. we were just discussing last evening that we found each other thru the überfabulous sandra juto's blog. and we all know she's very inspiring too - so thanks sandra, you undoubtedly don't know it, but you brought us together. and i'm so pleased with what's unfolding.  both kristina and i were traveling last week and we're sharing our travel photos all week, but first, a little glimpse of the weekend just gone by. do go check it out here.

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as you all undoubtedly have noticed, i travel quite a lot. i need the excitement. i need the pulse. i need to see new things, to experience new things. going away makes me more grateful for home as well. in short, travel is a sort of life blood to me, keeping my perspectives fresh and my eye honed. it makes me tick. i was thinking about the things that i look for when i travel. i find i'm drawn to the familiar...

starbucks only recently came to denmark and it's only in the airport, so i associate starbucks with travel (sorry bill, i love a good starbucks latte, despite what they did to the sonics). and look how relaxing it is!

but mostly, i'm drawn to the strange, the unexpected, the challenging...

and i'm a sucker for a good ruin--tho' this one--newgrange, a stone age site, was a bit reconstructed (in the 60s, can you tell?) for my taste...

there were some marvelous petroglyphs (my beloved helleristninger) there, which i am certain will be showing up soon in my art.

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i've been vicariously watching the results of rachel's latest art journaling course go up in the flickr group and have been doing a bit of art journaling along with it...as you saw last month. and i've got a couple of pages going, where i have created a lovely background and i'm totally stuck on the words. me, stuck on words, imagine that. i wonder why that happens? i'm trying not to obsess about it and just let them come in their own good time and in the meantime, enjoy making pages that will be great bases for the eventual words.

* * *

hmm, what else inspires of late?

there's a lot of shoe and foot photography out there in the blogosphere these days and i'm finding it has made me a little obsessed with both buying new shoes and photographing them. hmm. i wonder if this particular bit of inspiration is healthy? got these in dublin (which you already know if you've been hanging out on twitter). they're super comfortable and they look pretty in the afternoon sun. 

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i find myself going back again and again to look at jude hill's marvelous spirit cloth creations. both on her blog and on flickr. her small quilted stories are so dense with layered meaning that i am just drawn to them and inspired by them. i've worked a bit farther on the first piece that has arisen from her inspiration and still don't know what it will be. i'm using it as an exercise in patience as well and just enjoying the process of watching it unfold before me and trying to listen to my inner muse when she tells me what comes next.

where are you finding inspiration these days?

the danes are a happy people

in a hyperlink world, your progression of thoughts goes something like this...starlene sends you an email citing this quote which came from here:

"Despite not having money, do you still love your life?:  That’s such an American question. Somewhere behind those 10 words is the reason the US continues to linger in the mid-30s of the world happiness index. You know, we get crushed by the Danes in that index every year? -Fucking Danes are so happy! 

The answer is a resounding “sure”. Like most people, I get bummed out a lot, but not about money. I just try to remind myself of my friends, the cool town I live in, and that once in a while I’ll make someone laugh who kinda needed a chuckle. Hell, it’s not Denmark-Euphoria, but most of the time it’s enough.

starlene's path to the quote had started at tangobaby, gone to tangobaby's i live here: SF project blog, then to broke-ass stuart's blog, which led to the link above featuring broke-ass of the week: jeff cleary. and then, all of these links made me go in search of that world happiness index report thingie that the danes come out on top of year after year, so i googled and i found this analysis and this one (featuring a clip on the happiness of danes which was done by 60 minutes) and this one. and naturally, it got me thinking...

actually, every time i see this report of the world happiness index, which the danes have come out on top of for like twenty years, it makes me think. because frankly, i don't think you can tell it by looking at them. you'd expect more overt smuggery (thank you for that word spudballoo) from them, walking around all satisfied and happy like that. but honestly, you don't see it. in fact, if you looked around at the lack of interaction between people (best observed when someone has just run over your foot with their big-ass baby carriage and not apologized) and the no smiling as they walk down the street (especially not at a stranger, ew, shudder at the thought of strangers), you'd actually get the impression that they were quite an unhappy little nation.

starlene asked if it was true that the danes were so happy and i dashed off an answer on my iPhone...one that strangely, in all of my thinking about it over the years, i hadn't actually articulated before. previously, i'd flippantly suggested that it was about low expectations...if you don't expect much, you're pretty satisfied with what you get, right? but there is something more to it than that.

i think it has to do with people feeling generally valued. minimum wage is 120 kroner/hour, which at today's exact exchange rate, which i just ran on XE is $22.41, so even if you're working for minimum wage, you might not go to mallorca for two weeks every summer, but you can live an ok life. (i also think this high minimum wage has to do with why the service culture sucks, but that's the stuff of another post.)

people also feel that their things are valuable. just as an example, our house, which is an ordinary four-bedroom 200m2 house in an ordinary neighborhood and might cost $200,000 in a decent suburb in an american city of similar size, would list for an asking price of $672,000 if we were to put it on the market. this is after the market adjustment that's happened in the past six months. not that i'm saying that people feel happy sitting around converting their real estate to dollars in their heads..it's more a content knowledge that your assets are worth something.

people also feel safe and they trust the people around them. i have to admit that we rarely lock our house and we never lock our car. half the time, i leave the key in the car and our bikes stand out in the bike shed with the keys in their locks (granted i wouldn't do this in the center of copenhagen, but where we live, no problem).

then, there's also that it's a more egalitarian place. there's less hierarchy between jobs. when i first came to denmark more than a decade ago, i remember being struck by the fact that if someone worked in a factory or as a clerk in a store, they didn't seem to have any desire to downplay that. they would openly talk about standing on an assembly line, doing monotonous repetitive work in a positive way that wasn't familiar to me from the US (ok, since i came to denmark straight from the U of C, i might have had a skewed world view, i'll admit). but the fact is that it's a shorter distance from richest to poorest in denmark and there are a whole lotta people in the middle, so people feel equal and worthy of their fellow man.

the danes don't have the baggage of having to live "the american dream," that we as americans are both blessed and cursed with. that's actually one of the things that i was worried about with sabin growing up here...that she wouldn't grow up with the expectation that she could become anything she wanted to be. i no longer feel that way and think she's growing up with a different view on being whatever she wants to be--one that's less competitive and healthier and far more relaxed.

because if anything, i think the danes are quite relaxed. i know that when i go to the US, i feel far more stressed and pushed--to be faster, to do more. here, people work hard, but they leave at 3 p.m. to pick up their kids, spend a few good hours with them between picking them up, dinner and getting them to bed and then get back online and attend to work again after the kids go to bed. they're accustomed to dealing with other time zones and know that it's sometimes necessary to join a conference call across the world at 9 p.m. and they do so without thinking much about it--it's just normal.

because although danes like to come back home and think denmark is the greatest, they are outward-looking and travel a lot. they are informed about what's going on in the world and interested in it. as VEG wrote recently, there are lots of americans who don't even really know where canada is and it's sitting right there on top of them. danes have a remarkable awareness of and interest in the world. and this may make them happy to be back at home in their little country where although there are problems, there's a secure social welfare system and free medical care as well as a good public transport net and safe roads.

just an example of the social welfare system: i keep reading about people in the US who are laid off from one day to the next. that can't happen here. you can be laid off, of course, but the company must continue to pay you for three months if you've been in the job for less than three years. if it's more than three years, they have to pay you another month for every year, so 4 years = 4 months, and so on. this gives you time and breathing room to recover from the shock and find another job before you run completely out of money. and even if you don't find something, there's social welfare to keep you from having to sell off your firstborn child on ebay (tho' you may want to do that some days anyway, depending on the behavior of said child and your level of patience).

while i believe that all of these factors contribute to the danes' general level of happiness (and frankly, i'm  a pretty happy and content person myself, so it does rub off), there are flip sides to it. like a general level of impoliteness and a lack of service culture that i also believe are results of all of this equality.

but for the most part, it's true, denmark is a pretty happy place. just look at that cheerful red and white flag? how could that not make you happy?

what i've learned so far this week

what a week! i've been busy late into the night every night this week. and i thought i'd share a few things that i've learned along the way....

1. writing a whole 40+ page magazine more or less by yourself is not easy.
2. it's best if you never, ever let yourself think of it all at once (because it turns out that's quite breathtakingly paralyzing), but instead keep thinking of it in individual articles/items in a checklist. small, digestible chunks, in other words.
3. even if you think of it in individual pieces, it somehow does end up all fitting together, because it's all coming from your brain.
4. when you do a series of interviews on similar topics over several days, you should really type out everything from your notes after each interview. this will help you immeasurably later. (note to self: follow this advice in the future. for. sure.) if you don't, they can become jumbled up in your head and in your notes and take a whole lot longer to write into a coherent story.
5. a smooth stone, held in your hand occasionally for strength, helps your concentration.
6. chill/lounge music in the background is also good for concentration.
7. you will wake up in a cold sweat at 5:12 a.m., worried about whether you're ever going to get it all done.
8. you will get it all done.
9. you have to accept that some of it is good and some of it is dross. (dang, that is a seriously harsh word when i think about it.) but the fact is that there's only so much you can do to sex up propellers, hull coatings and propulsion systems. 
10. thrusters, on the other hand, are by their very nature, sexy as hell.
11. i thought briefly that i had lost my rock when i took sabin to the dentist, but after an only mildly panicked frantic search, i found it in the car. and felt very relieved. note to self: keep track of the damn rock.
12. a woman in england apparently kept the body of her mother in her freezer for 20 years. and i thought i was bad about cleaning out the freezer. i wonder if she had a special freezer dedicated to just that or if she kept food in there too.
13. jane fonda has been rendered unrecognizable by plastic surgery, but she's still sharp and funny (thanks david letterman (and TV2Zulu for broadcasting you when it's time to make lunch)).
14. there are people who are my age and who have children the age of my child who do not spend any time at all in cyberspace and yet they still think they exist. imagine that. i could not, however, verify their actual existence since i was unable to find them online.
15. those people who can't speak the language of blogging, facebook, twitter, flickr, linked-in, plaxo, tumblr, and social media in general are being sorely left behind and will undoubtedly soon divide off the human branch, like neanderthals. i mean, they can hardly even participate in a normal conversation.
16. in a fit of madness desire to inhabit a physical presence within my local community, i volunteered our house for a parents' party for all of the parents in sabin's class. sadly, we have nothing in common with them other than the fact that we managed to produce offspring at around the same time. and since the party is at our house, we won't be able to slip away. however, i did manage to make sure that the party will have an ABBA theme, so if i'm dressed as Agnete, eating a shrimp cocktail, and sipping a cold martini, i will no doubt care less.
17. i found my "U." it was in the basket with all of the DS games.
18. my light, bright dining room is a good place to work.
19. the pope has an iPhone. this means one of two things--either the iPhone is SO over or it's the only phone where you can get a direct line to god. if you were so inclined. which i suppose you are if you're the pope.
20. some people strongly fear being different or standing out or putting their 7-year-old on a trans-atlantic flight all by herself. i thought i feared those people, but i'm actually grateful for their existence, because it makes my existence more unique. and it always comes back to me. now would you please hand me my tiara?

what have you learned so far this week?

tuesday means it's time for randomness

totally gratuitous picture of an airplane wing

because she did it and so did she 

and i hate to be albanienated (great word HRH TFM!)

yes, it's time for one of those random posts. is it usually on a tuesday? do i always feel random on tuesdays? does my brain always overload on tuesday? these are just a small selection of the random thoughts going through my head at the moment. here are the rest.

: : danes should not rap. they have not suffered enough. there is no 'hood. danish sounds like crap when rapped.

: : even more so norwegians. it's just not authentic when you're so white and so upper middle class. do not rap, please. got it?

: : thankfully, i have never heard swedish rap. swedes probably have too much taste and class. and too many volvos. people never rap about a volvo. or a saab.

: : i'm a night person, not a morning person. night feels deliciously long, it stretches out to be all the time i need it to be. morning feels impossibly fleeting and bound to be interrupted by day itself. gimme night any day.

: : "i made some new spaces inside myself." --jane campion, IHT, 17/5.09

: : still doing tara's double colons instead of bullets. i love them.

: : why oh why did they make more than one episode of that ridiculous stylista show? i'm only watching again in the eternal futile hope that they are all taken out back and shot at the end of THIS one.

: : "i followed your blog now. does that mean it will come when i call it?" --monique, via googletalk, 18/5.09

: : i want a tattoo of a helleristning.

: : do you think it's possible that otherwise cool cities have pockets of dorkiness? how do they become that way when they're surrounded by coolness?

: : do you ever have the feeling that everyone else has it all figured out and you're the only one who doesn't?

: : when will the last of the dinosaurs really die out?

it's just so good to get this out. thanks for listening. if you have answers to any of these questions, please do leave a comment! or just share your own randomness. it's all good.

the things you hold onto

there's no place like home

i've lived away from my country of birth during the whole monica lewinsky thing + the entire bush administration, that's now more than a decade. people always ask me what i miss. and aside from my family, which is a given, i usually say, just The Gap. and i do miss the gap. except when they forget that what they do is make great hooded sweatshirts, but i'm confident they'll remember soon.

but when i think about it, there are other things. like hot rollers. nobody does hot rollers where i live and i'd like to have the occasional curly hair day (that would make my mom happy as well, she always thinks that a look is never really complete if you have flat hair).

and there's the fact that clabber girl baking powder is the best kind. we, of course, have baking powder too, but it's just not the same. however, our yeast (blocks of the fresh kind) totally kicks those wussy dry packets. and mom sends me clabber girl when i need it.

and although ikea now has a form of zip-loc bag available, you can't get that really nice little snack size zip-locs that are ideal for sabin's lunches. so we still import those.

i would say that i let go of other things in stages. for the first couple of years, i imported mentadent toothpaste. i loved that stuff, but now i've gotten used to colgate (because it's available here too) and i no longer need to use up valuable luggage space on that. i'm not even sure they still make it. i think i liked that little push thingie it came in.

i also would lay in a large supply of dry idea deodorant whenever i was home, but now i can deal with whatever's available on the grocery store shelf--rexona or whatever. it really all works equally well. (except when you forget to pack it.)

i miss regular access to vanity fair and atlantic monthly and the new yorker, but perhaps enjoy them more because i only get them once in awhile when i pass through an airport or city that has them, so the pain is less than i would once have imagined.

same with movies. i used to have to see every movie in the theatre on the weekend it came out. now, pretty much the only time i see movies is on a long-haul flight. and i don't miss it, not even a little bit. perhaps my taste has improved or movies have not. but with something like a new james bond, we do still go on opening weekend. (perhaps i should take a lesson from this on the whole getting rid of the t.v. notion.)

some of these are surely products of growing older, but they're also about the adaptability of humans to their surroundings. i have my frustrations with what i at times perceive as the impoliteness of danes, but for the most part, i feel i'm home. it's here my best and favorite people are and our home is filled with memories of our life, even if we use different products than i was once used to.

i think it was B who said it not long ago, home is where your books are. your toothpaste and deodorant, those change. and as you can see, my books are most decidedly here...

random thoughts to clear my head, take 3(00)

i love my job, but right now, i'm on input overload, which means it's time for a little deposit of random thoughts to clear my head.

: : would i rather have a bionic arm or a bionic leg?

: : what magical combination of factors happened so that this remote, northern island-y (is that a word?) area that's actually kind of a pain in the ass to get around in has such a high concentration of highly-specialized, really technical people/companies doing super cool innovative stuff?

: : could it be residue of the viking spirit i've been looking for lo these many years?

: : shouldn't someone try to duplicate that in africa?

: : are certain names bitch names? if so, which ones are they? if we knew, could we just avoid people with those names?

: : what IS my superpower?

: : has everyone checked out the hermit book club? because it's gonna be so cool! tho' i do wonder how it's going to involve food...

: : why is paris hilton still alive?

: : i really wish i was home to discuss all of the new theories which are swirling in my head with husband. he's the best theorizer i know. which is just another way in which he is a keeper.

: : i wonder if the gods of blogger do any tracking of the way in which their BoN thing brings people together and how many more blogs it actually sprouts (i can think of three off the top of my head--one, two and three ) and if that's actually their diabolical plan...in which case, cool. i love diabolical plans, don't get me wrong.

: : what might it mean if your regular grocery list includes wasabi peas?

: : what will future innovation look like? some kind of even more matrix-like collaboration between people and companies?

: : what if more CO2 was actually what the planet needed? (i don't necessarily believe this, i'm just half-listening to a debate on global warming on swedish television as i type this.)

: : george stephanopolis is not really as cute anymore as he once was. that makes me think that perhaps i'm also not as cute as i once was...arrgh!

: : that little doggie was so cute last weekend. but i'm a cat person, how can i have such doggie lust? is it because a pug is actually a cat in dog form?

: : and lastly, what about this guy...

in which she worries about the future

last night, we got home from playing cards with friends and started flipping through channels, as one does. we landed on an episode of law & order: SVU which featured a former IRA terrorist who had gone mercenary and was working for columbian drug lords since he was trained to kill and there wasn't so much killing to do anymore in ireland. so, very uplifting, as you might imagine, but a notch above the documentary on schools in germany which were training little super nazis in the years leading up to and during WWII that was on DR2.  during the commercials, husband was flipping to BBC world, where they were talking about years of strife in the congo on hardtalk. reminders of mubuto sese seko and laurent kabila and now his son flashed across the screen. why didn't i just walk away and curl up with mma ramotswe, you ask?

good question.

i sat watching these programs and i began to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. i was glad sabin had fallen asleep and wasn't watching that kind of stuff. and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was for her sake. because sometimes i it makes me really ill to imagine the world she will inherit. what are we doing to our planet and ourselves? and are we just sitting here, letting it happen, as we watch it all unfold on t.v.?

there was a news recap on BBC during one of the breaks and they very dramatically and with a tone of indignation reported that russia had kicked out a couple of canadian diplomats from NATO offices in moscow. of course they did, that kind of thing happens all the time and the dudes were probably spies. which, if the editor choosing that story and the angle for that story had the slightest modicum of historical knowledge, would have been obvious. and then they would have realized it was actually really rather a non-story.

and this caused me to think of an article in information the other day about how few danish politicians (20%) think that studying the humanities (including history) is important. maybe i'm a bit touchier about this than most because i actually have a master's degree in humanities, but i think it's important to mankind's ability to sort out the world around us and make the right decisions. decisions of all kinds--but especially decisions relating to governing and how we treat one another and the planet (which cannot be done without governments cooperating). but we can't negotiate the waters as is necessary if we have no historical, sociological, cultural knowledge/background--all of which come from the humanities. it's good for us to read the classics and the so-called great books. it equips us with the necessary tools to think about things and sort them out and analyze and make good decisions. even editorial decisions like about whether it's a big deal or not that russia kicks out a couple of canadian diplomats.

and i worry that the world that sabin is inheriting isn't going to have people who are able to do that. i mean, if it's this bad now, how much worse will it get? where are the great thinkers today? the great ideas? the great philosophers? the great writers? as much as i respect and even like a guy like thomas friedman, who is arguably a public intellectual on the scene today, he's no kirkegaard. where are the people of that caliber today? where is today's dostoevsky? or voltaire? or byron? or thomas jefferson? where are the great men and women? instead we've got britain's got talent and madonna trying to adopt a kid in malawi and some asshole reporter asking some stupid football player what he thinks about climate change. we're asking all of the wrong people the wrong questions.

i want to shelter sabin from it, to keep that balloon before her face--so that what she knows is joy and laughter and all of the colorfulness there is in the world. but i know that balloon will rise and she'll have to face the mess we've left her with. and that just makes me feel sick to my stomach.

sorry for this uncharacteristically somber post, it's been grey and dreary all week and the world just gets me down sometimes.

the zone

in my this girl post a couple of weeks ago, i mentioned the zone. it's the feeling that i get when everything is clicking, my energy is high, i'm wearing the right clothes, having a good hair day and i can actually SEE people around me being caught up in the sheer force of it. but as i said in that post, i have no control of it. i can tell when it's there, but i can't make it come. i wish i could, because i'm extremely convincing and i always get my way when i'm in the zone. that and actually seeing people be swept up in it are the best parts about it.

certain places are more sure to make it come than others. one of them was associated with my old place of work and one is actually where i work now. so it might have to do with good scandinavian architecture. but i also had moments of being in the zone long before i ever even imagined visiting scandinavia, so it's not only that. i was once totally in the zone on a train speeding through the macedonian countryside on a warm summer night. i have no idea what brought it on, but the train conductor (who was thankfully harmless) found it very compelling and kept lurking outside the coupé.

husband says at those moments that i'm "beaming life," and it was what attracted him to me, lo so many years ago when he was someone else's husband and frankly, i was someone else's wife (but i digress). but i think that what it comes down to is a sense of energy that can almost be seen.

i'm not actually sure how much it has to do with the people around me, but it would make sense that it has something to do with them. i don't know if it's so much that they make me enter the zone or that they prolong it once i'm there. i probably shouldn't actually overanalyze it too much, but you know me, i have to try to pick things apart and understand them.

mostly because i'd like to be able to control it. i'd like to be able to wake up and say, "i'm so gonna be in the zone today!"  but that's simply not how it works.

so i try to enjoy it when it happens. i watch the reactions of people who are hit by it full force. they sometimes have a slightly awed look, or they look like they've just had the wind knocked out of them. some of them try to play it cool and act as if they're in the zone themselves. but it's disarming. it might be why sometimes people tell me all kinds of things, things they wouldn't normally say. or they try to prolong the conversation, hoping that the energy will stay there so they can soak some of it in. or they just hover nearby, not entirely daring to say anything.

but when i'm in the zone, there's plenty of energy for all, so it's not like they're stealing it from me. it's kind of like those old doritos commercials where they said, "eat all you want, we'll make more," the energy is like that. the more people take it to themselves, the more there is. like an endless bright glow of energy. i found myself wanting to assign a color to it, but my mild sinaesthesia tells me that it's different colors all the time, depending on the situation, it's not just one color.

i suppose you can tell that i had one of those days today. i had so many ideas and i felt so excited about what i was doing and discovering (perhaps it's that that puts me in the zone in the first place). the very somber, but sweet man who sits across from me, calculating energy curves and the wave effects on paint coating and how much CO2 it saves if you sail at a certain speed, was knocked quite visibly off-balance, but you could see that it was in a good way. and that he didn't want it to stop. and neither did i.

do any of you know what i mean? and how would you describe that feeling? the zone is just the words i've assigned to it. i've also heard it described as being in flow. what do you call it when you feel it, because i think we all feel it on occasion.

oh well, i'll stop obsessing now and just be grateful for it when it comes.

the new new world order

i've had a monster headache for several hours today that's only just fading now. whether it's that or rereading the no. 1 ladies detective agency series (i'm almost to the end of morality for beautiful girls, which is #3), i'm finding myself subject to deep musings (mma ramotswe will do that to you)....

...like what does it mean when a major UK newspaper (the evening standard) is owned by a russian oligarch?

...and what are the implications that china owns all of the US debt?

...and spain is producing upwards of 40% of their electricity (depending on the day) using wind power?

maybe all this just means i've had the BBC on in the background while i made pizza dough for dinner later this evening. but i also think that these are signs of a new new world order. with the US floundering, new empires are emerging. ones wherein russian oil gazillionaires can control a piece of western media (wasn't there a james bond movie about that?) and where china is quietly assuming a position of world domination. and where spain, a place one doesn't always liken to the most forward-thinking, developed place on the planet, is actively working on getting themselves less dependent on foreign oil.

these are definitely things to ponder, whether you're in the aura of a headache or not...