on travel and home and the passive aggressive nature of facebook

this morning, i read what suzanne (eggdipdip) wrote about home and going back and how the reality of your life is never as you imagined it would be. and i also read this charming little new yorker piece on guests, family and growing older by david sedaris. even before reading these i was pondering questions of family, home, visits, travels and belonging. 

last week, i got all bent out of shape at my sister, who hadn't shared any pictures, or more importantly, any stories, from the rest of their trip (they went on to london and paris after leaving denmark), except for a couple of iPhone photos sent from the road. for all i knew, she was still combing paris for some raspberry pastries that she had vowed to eat all of before returning home. i'd asked her a couple of times on facebook when she was going to start sharing her photos and got some smarty pants answer about how she was going old school and going to have them printed this time. 

the more time that went by with no sharing of stories and experiences and photographic evidence, the more pissy i became. and then it all exploded last week after she nagged me (on facebook) about not handling molly's kittens too much. and facebook, being the passive aggressive central station that it is, escalated things, until we were both mad at each other. and she was issuing "apologies" where in she said she was sorry that i was mad, not that she was sorry she hadn't shared any photos or stories. which is different than apologizing. and possibly could be classified as not apologizing at all.  ahh, sisters, they know better than anyone else how to wind you up. 

but the bottom line was, that i was feeling left out of the rest of the trip and at first it made me sad and then it made me mad. the timing wasn't right for us to tag along to london and omaha beach and paris, so when they left us after their visit, we had to live vicariously through their travels. and if the ones you're living vicariously through don't share what's happening, what you experience is far from vicarious enjoyment. 

then of course, she got home and life intervened and she didn't get the photos downloaded and sorted from various cameras and iDevices and soon several weeks had gone by. but you can never really know what it's like inside of someone else's home life, so if you're far away and not aware of how loan closings and baseball games and trips to the emergency room intervened, you just sit in your own home environment, which is calm and quite uneventful and wait. and grow impatient and a little bit pissy. 

which i guess brings me to what this all got me thinking about...that having visitors upsets the natural rhythms of home in ways that are both good and bad (tho' i will say that my family's visit wasn't long enough to have moved on to the bad part, tho' we could have done without the constant references to the 1990 miss south dakota pageant). a visit pushes you out of your usual routines - you look around you with a different set of eyes - suddenly noticing all of those signs with the word "fart" on them again and being reminded that that's hilarious. you end up filled with expectations, both voiced and unvoiced. and when it all goes back to the routine, you feel a little disrupted and restless. and it takes awhile to find your footing again.

it's the same for the one traveling, there's a re-entry period, where they jump back into life at home and maybe find there's not time to download all of those photos and look through to select the ones to share.   and meanwhile, you sit impatiently waiting to live vicariously through the rest of their travels, to let them transport you as well for a few moments, outside the confines of home. 

the view from a safe distance

i am really at a loss for words about the events in connecticut. i feel a little bit about it like i did about 9/11 - i didn't know anyone involved, so it didn't really affect me directly, but yet, i feel somehow personally wounded by it anyway. so senseless. so violent. so incomprehensible. and i suppose we'll never know what possessed that young man to do it. and writing it off to madness somehow negates it, so i hesitate to even think that.

but i think the most disappointing thing has been the idiocy of the gun-happy people - some of whom are sadly, close to my own family. an inflammatory conversation on facebook has me fuming. how on earth can someone who is a teacher herself defend guns and make the most absurd arguments (aren't teachers taught basic rhetoric) in the hours immediately following the events? the timing of the ridiculous arguments, while the details were still fuzzy, chilled me to the bone. interesting that the person in question never dares in person to broach such subjects, but chooses the passive aggressive forum that is facebook to do so. but that's no doubt the stuff of a different post.

the fact is that this introverted, socially-awkward kid did what he did because legally-obtained guns were at hand in his home (why on earth an elementary school teacher had need for multiple semi-automatic weapons is another mystery). if he'd had to go out and try to obtain them illegally, he wouldn't have known where to begin. this happened because he had access to guns.

i feel for all those families, devastated right before christmas. but if anything good can come of it (and it seems an awful lot like there's nothing good in it at all), we can hope that something will be done with the gun laws in the US. there are entirely too many stories like this one, whether on a campus, in a school or in a movie theatre. apparently americans are not to be trusted with guns. and this is surely not what they meant with the second amendment.

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....

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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.

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last evening, i got bored on pinterest.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.