the only way out is through

i can feel that i'm out of practice at this. i sat down at the computer to write after some surprise overnight guests (the best kind) left this morning and nothing really wanted to come out my fingers. it didn't help that our internet at home was iffy after being unplugged in the night during a lightning storm. instead of fiddling around and troubleshooting it, i headed for the library, but it's hot here and that's not helping the flow of ideas. i never used to lack ideas to write about, but my writing muscle has clearly atrophied. i was thinking that a way out of it would be to muse on a single topic or word, along the lines of john green's anthropocene reviewed podcast, where he rates two random things on a 5-point scale. but i can't even think of a word to muse upon. i think i've bottled up my words and thoughts for so long that they've formed a kind of cork that needs to be removed and it feels like i've misplaced my corkscrew. maybe just expressing all of this will help me remember where i left it. in the meantime, i recommend that you seek more exciting corners of the internet until i find my groove again.

reflections on the blogosphere and real life

it's back to school time. back to work (tho' technically i was working in singapore last week). back to daily routines. and back to the airport - tho' today it's husband who is going (to north carolina, via chicago, oddly enough). me, i don't fly 'til friday, when i head for blog camp 1.5 in london.

looking back on the past month, i realize how busy it's been. i didn't really have time off, since i haven't officially earned any yet, so our small holidays were sneaked in here and there along with work. but we did manage to add three new starbucks mugs to our collection, so three new places were visited - KL, amsterdam and dublin. i didn't get a new singapore mug, tho' they had some that match this new series, because i already got singapore years ago. it's rather fun to have the style of the mug reflect the period in which you first visited the place. and i won't at all devote any reflection to the implications of the cultural imperialism of starbucks in places as different from one another as KL and dublin. me, i'm just grateful for a grande latte, loungey, comfortable seating below the herstal lamps and free wifi, wherever it's found.

* * *

over the past couple of weeks, where i have been largely away from the blogosphere (at least from the reading blogs side of it), i realized a few things. the blogosphere isn't as different from real life as i thought it was. there is lots of drama, catfighting, petty annoyances, pettier obsessions and women being hard on women (why do we do that to ourselves?). happily, that negativity is easier to avoid than in real life, since you can just stay away from the places where it's going on and there's no danger of actually running into someone you'd rather not run into. and there's so much goodness going on in the blogosphere--things to inspire, make you laugh, things to learn, things that make you think there is hope for the world--that it more than makes up for the negatives. maybe it's just normal that in cyberspace, as in real life, we make friends, keep some of them, grow apart from others, move on and make new friends. i'm not sure why i thought it was any different online than offline, but somehow i did.

* * *

and speaking of new friends, in singapore, i got together rather spontaneously for a quick drink with a blogger who i haven't known for that long...kim of measure of all things. kim is a south african who lives and works in singapore. she very good-naturedly allowed herself to be subjected to our questions about how on earth she can take living in the plastic world that is singapore. and she did confirm my suspicions that singapore is a great place to be an ex-pat. it's safe, clean, it functions very well and there are cheap flights to more exotic, real destinations in the region. i still have half a mind to spend some time there working at some point. it is difficult for me to imagine being from cape town tho' and wanting to be anywhere but there, but on the other hand, i do love a good adventure, so it was great fun to meet kim. and for that opportunity, i am very grateful to the blogosphere. and if you really want to both crochet and be really inspired in a really brainy, deep way, you must read kim's latest blog post. and take the time to watch the video. it's blow-you-away amazing.

* * *

this time of year, as summer transitions to fall, i always feel reflective. and i think that transition is an apt word. also here in the blogosphere. when i look back a year, things have changed a great deal. that's partially due to BoN, but i think it's more natural and organic than that. i think that here in cyberspace as in life, we make transitions. new interests that we write about bring new readers and we make new friends. some of the old friends drift away because at the same time, they have moved to different interests and have new readers and new friends on their own blogs. some blog friends endure and sadly, some do not. some go to a place that you simply can't follow. but the beauty and wonder of it to me is that there are always new blogs to discover, new connections to make. and i've noticed that i have a lot of new people leaving comments and i'm really happy for the discoveries of new blogs and new perspectives that gives me. this is not to say that i don't love comments from the old crowd too--i'm just trying to say that i love the expanding sense of community. so thank you ALL for your comments, they're wonderful.

i have found some really good friends here in this bloggy world. and i've drifted away from others. but there are a few, that although we've drifted apart, i know our relationship would prove to be cat love and at some point, something will again strike a chord and we'll be back to our wonderful, deep level of friendship that we had developed. because in some sense we do get to know one another quite well here, don't we? the medium of the blog is very personal and diaristic at times (sometimes nauseatingly so, admittedly). we simply reveal so much of ourselves through our words and pictures, even if those pictures don't necessarily show us. the things we choose to share (or not share) speak volumes and in many ways, we are laid bare for all to see.

maybe that's why failed friendships in the blogosphere hurt as much as they do. we've revealed ourselves, left ourselves vulnerable and open. and when we're rejected or worse, ignored, it hurts that much more. or maybe i'm being too deep and philosophical - forgive me, it's a rainy monday - maybe real life simply intervenes and it's so much more compelling than online life that people just drift away. or maybe it's just that sometimes you feel all vibrant and sometimes you feel like earth tones, so as i said, more natural and organic than anything else.

* * *

at the end of the week, i'll go to blog camp 1.5 at Bee's house in england. Bee is one of several soul sisters i've found in this bloggy world. she and i are the same age, we both married a european man and uprooted ourselves from the land of our birth. we both abandoned Ph.D. studies before the dissertation stage. she has daughters and so do i. strangely enough, we even have an LNG thing in common. i feel i already know her so well and i know that from the minute i see her this weekend, we'll be completely at ease together and we won't even come close to running out of things to talk about. i have that wonderful feeling of anticipation of meeting her. the one where you want to capture that first time moment because you only have a first time once and you want to treasure it so you can mull it over later.

so i'm really looking forward to the bloggy world and the real world converging once again this coming weekend when B, polly, seaside girl, kristina, spudballoo and me get together at bee's house. and i'm certain that i will not be disappointed.

blog camp anyone?

the scene for blog camp

this morning, i was catching up on my blog reading (i didn't get done yet, so if you're missing me, don't worry, i'll be by soon) at the table instead of reading the newspaper (which is over-hyping the one solitary case of H1N1 in denmark anyway). i was reading funny snippets of some of my favorite blogs out loud to husband (who is a bit mystified by the entire blog thing and often advises me to find friends in my local space rather than in cyberspace). i had just read something funny and i sighed, "i want to hang out with these people in real life." husband said, "why don't you have a blog camp, they could come and hang out with you in your writing house." (writing house is the original name for my garden studio/atelier/place of creativity.)

and so i began to imagine what blog camp would look like...

: : nobody would get dressed all day if they didn't want to, they could hang out in their pajamas.

: : we would probably all sit in the same room on our laptops IMing each other.

: : we would drink copious amounts of wine.

: : we would cook and eat the fabulous food we made.

: : we would stay up late.

: : we would drink lots of pots of tea and many lattes.

: : we would figure out how to make those hearts in the latte foam by practicing lots and lots of times.

: : in the unlikely event we got dressed, we would go on photo walks. or maybe if we were all in our PJs, we could go on photo walks anyway...and end up being known as the pajama gang. or the pajama mafia. i've always wanted to be part of a gang.

: : we would laugh a whole lot.

: : hopefully someone would teach me to crochet and/or knit.

: : and we just might make plausible plans for taking over the world.

: : oh, and OF COURSE, we would blog the whole thing (thanks hit 40)!

doesn't that sound good?

what would you wanna do at blog camp?

strings of memory unravelling inside of me

wow, how did it get to be friday already? this week has flown past. late last sunday night, i promised that before the week was out, i'd write about my favorite murakami, so i guess i'd better get to it.

drum roll, please...and my favorite murakami is......

hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. or is it wind-up bird chronicle? or is it dance, dance, dance? i have a hard time with this question. for one, because of murakami's recurring themes--realities which bleed into one another, seedy hotels, wells, young disturbed girls in need of mental help--his books blur together for me a bit.

i do think wind-up bird is the best and i certainly learned the most from it, including some things i didn't really want to know, like the art of skinning someone alive with a very sharp knife. but my sister has that book right now (she was a little miffed i hadn't warned her about the skinning), so i can't really refer to it in writing this, so i think i'll go with hard-boiled wonderland. you see, i need to refer to the actual book in order to write this, because what i love most about murakami is his language (tho' i realize there is a level of absurdity in that statement since i'm not reading it in the original japanese, therefore it's actually his translator's language). my extensively underlined, scrawled-in copy of hard-boiled wonderland is translated by alfred birnbaum and i actually find his translations less smooth than those of jay rubin, but not knowing japanese, i don't really know who is capturing the style and language of murakami's original better. but, as usual, i digress.

often the turns of phrase i love most are just that, turns of phrase, fragments, not even whole sentences. things like:

• invisible airborne sediments of time
• tapping into something beyond memory
• time folded back on itself
• a remnant torn from a bolt of the sky
• a distinct plum pit of chaos at the center
• the cut ends of my memory
• awareness spliced together
• the smell of memory, real memory
• the screen of consciousness

it's clear, looking over this list that i'm drawn to issues of time and memory. i knew that about me already. if i'd written that dissertation, i'd have written on conceptions of time and memory in eastern european postmodern fiction. i think one of the things i love about murakami is he transports me almost instantly to the higher level of thinking about these issues that i had achieved when i was in graduate school. it makes me feel good to know it can be instantly turned on again and that i haven't lost it completely.

i've always been interested in the intersection of memory and fiction, because isn't a memory already a fiction in a way, since it can never truly capture the reality of a moment as it was? does your memory of a real event actually change the event? or even construct it? i love that murakami explores these questions and that his gift is being able to express them so well. i often feel he has tapped directly into a thought i've had but had been unable to articulate.

in graduate school and for years in my journals i have written from a quote, just to see where it takes me. i'm often surprised where i end up. it's always interesting to see what comes out my fingers onto the page. all of my copies of murakami are full of underlinings and scrawlings and scribblings in the margins that will provide me fodder for this way of thinking through writing for years to come. here are just a few:

• "memories feign through scarcely perceived doors of my being."
• "i began to feel a string of memory slowly unravelling inside of me."
  
• "without memory to measure things against, how could i ever know?"
  
• "even without you knowing, you function as yourself."
  
• "as you create memories, you're creatin' a parallel world."
  

what would it mean for a string of memory to slowly unravel inside of me? would it be the dissolution of a relationship? or would it be an unfolding of a long forgotten memory (a paradox in itself), a resurfacing of a moment of perfect clarity, brought on by a scent or a certain cast of light? what would the unravelling feel like? would it make me feel free? or sorrowful? or joyful? lighter? heavier? reading such a sentence makes me want to be more conscious and on the lookout for such moments. perhaps strings of memory unravel inside of me all the time and i'm just not conscious of it. perhaps i can tune in and become more conscious of such moments, just by reading such a poetic sentence.

for me, this is why reading enriches my life--especially my inner life, but also my external life. reading murakami has sparked many an evening philosophical conversation with husband. he hasn't read any of it, but it's enough that i have. then i throw out some of these thoughts and we have endless hours of conversation.

i think murakami somehow confirms the vague feeling that i have that we are living simultaneously in multiple realities and that if we could just tune in a bit better, we could become aware of them and use them together in a more harmonious way. there must be moments of overlap. i feel quite certain that i'm living at least one parallel life in my dreams and i have flashes of this parallel existence in my waking hours, which no doubt help me cope with the reality at hand. i already think that creativity can flow between these realities that lie within us, and that talking about inspiration and having a muse is another way of trying to capture this. murakami just expresses it all in a way that speaks to me and makes me feel it might be possible to tune in and live more fully in all of my realities. which is why i'm also a bit apprehensive for the day when i've read all of his books and don't have any left. what if i'm not there yet when i've read everything he has to offer?

reality t.v. and inspiration

i'm jetlagging. i wake up promptly at 4:30 a.m. these days. and because i'm wide awake, i just get up. i actually quite like it, because i can sip my chai in quiet, early morning darkness and ponder things...things like how although obama won, we still aren't rid of sarah palin. she's busily being spoon fed fox TV opportunities to appear innocent and maligned by the meanies in washington. and people are still writing her love letters like this one (it's really quite hilarious, do go read it). and it struck me that she actually thinks she's some kind of winner on some (far) stranger than fiction reality show. then again, what reality show isn't stranger than fiction? the problem for me is that although we voted her off, she's STILL HERE, so it's like some especially perverse twisted reality show from hell. i do wish they'd stop broadcasting it soon.

* * *

but, thinking about reality t.v. reminds me of some concepts that husband and i once came up with for reality programs. one of our best friends is head of entertainment at the danish t.v. channel that i like to think of as the CSI channel. but, in addition to CSI, they also have a few locally-produced reality programs. gems like "farmer wants a wife" and "gay army" and "the young mothers," which could soon offer a spot to bristol palin (but i digress).   husband and i pitched the following to her:

1. gay construction--very flamboyantly gay men are given asphalt and paving equipment and asked to lay some road.
2. near miss--ordinary people as air traffic controllers in some of the world's busiest airports.
3. quack docs--ordinary people performing surgery on willing victims. we figured with the whole me-me-me culture of fame that there were enough stupid people out there on both sides to make half a dozen episodes or so.

strangely, despite how clearly inspired these ideas are, our friend didn't actually take any of them further...

* * *

and speaking of inspiration, in order to escape the SP channel, i went looking in the blogosphere for inspiration. and i found some here. and here. and here as well. and i totally love this, i mean who doesn't need some encouragement? and there's always so much inspiration on flickr.

i love the echoes journal so much, the notion of selecting and photographing objects, then trading them with three others and photographing them again is so appealing. does anyone want to do something similar? i'm seeing a cross-continental collaboration...won't you please play along?

parallel worlds in the mirror

what if, when we look in the mirror, we leave an imprint of ourselves there in the glass? a version of us that remains behind after we walk away. think of the infinite number of times you've looked in a mirror. the multitude of selves left behind. what are they doing? do we leave one behind every time we use the mirror, so the mirrors in my home, for example, are filled with hundreds of me. versions of me, one from every day, sometimes several times a day. do they have an entire existence over there in the mirror?

do my mirror self-portraits with the camera have a sort of doubling effect? think of the multiplicity of images. in the early days of photography, it was feared by some to capture the soul. i personally think the soul is more elusive than that. but, do mirrors and photos (which are a mirror of sorts) capture some fragment? something that remains. i don't have the sense of being less for losing those fragments of self, but i do wonder if they carry on parallel life over there in the mirror. a reality that, while different from the one i have here in the world that is not in the mirror, is a reality nonetheless.

how do those mirror selves fill their time? do they have entire lives going on beyond the glass? can they move beyond the confines of the mirror's frame? or do they wait there for you to return? i have this feeling that it's a bit like i think it is with my dream world--another life or lives going on over there entirely. because once you've left the fragment behind, you lose control of it. it separates and goes on to its own existence. you and yet not you.

is time the same over there in that mirror? or does it stand still--for example, the fragment of self you leave in a hotel room mirror, where you won't return to, do you age, or do you remain the age you left in that reflection? in your home mirrors, time must move at more or less the same speed as it does in this space, because there are so many new versions of you that you leave in those mirrors.

do you suppose it would be possible, if one were wearing the right lenses or was in the right frame of mind, to catch a glimpse of all of the people who have ever looked in that mirror? so the antique mirror we have in the hall would contain all of the people who looked in it before us and we would be shocked at how many people were there if we could just get our focus right and see them. i would really love to be able to do that, if only to see what they were wearing.

can you tell i'm reading murakami again? this time it's after dark.

of murakami, reality, home and possibilities

"it's no wonder you like to read books about reality, since you live so far from it." -- monica, starbucks, copenhagen airport, 10.09.08

my sister meant it better than it sounds. we had discussed murakami in the car all the way to the airport. i had said that what i like about murakami was his exploration of reality or rather realities. she said that likes how the language makes you trust those jobless, 30-something male characters. i was on my way to oslo, she on her way to chicago. they were calling me by name overhead, but i still had to get a grande latte.

what she was getting at was the crazy reality of our life at the moment. we've just (almost) finished getting our house the way we want it and now we're considering moving. not just down the street, but to another country. and at the moment, we don't really know which country. will it be norway or singapore? they sound diametrically opposed, but what they have in common is shipping. both are big locations for shipping. and i'm in shipping. and husband is considering getting into shipping as well. and there are exciting opportunities in both places. for both of us.

but it's all up in the air right now. theoretical. the stuff of pure possibility at the moment. and the subject of much conversation and speculation and scheming and imagining. how to make it work. scheming ways of having it all. it's hard to imagine parting with our house at the moment (i will definitely be taking that red smeg, no matter what, even if i have to sail it to singapore). but, could we afford to keep our house and buy another home? (that depends on the offers really and those are also theoretical--strong possibilities, but not definite yet.) norway is really, really expensive and if i think that, in comparison to denmark, it must be super, hyper expensive, because denmark is pretty expensive. if we had a house in denmark and an apartment in singapore, is that really realistic? how often will we get back and use the house in denmark?

in other words, where will life take us?

and this, combined with our home improvements, have had me thinking about home and what it means. and i'm not the only one, tangobaby wrote about home recently as did hele at truth cycles. it must be something in the air.

what is home, really? is it a place? a house? an apartment? fabulous red appliances? or is it a life lived together with those you love most? can anywhere be home, as long as those you love are there? could an artificial disneyland of a place like singapore really be home? or will it be the mountains of norway? or will we stay in the house that we have spent so much time and labor (not to mention money) getting exactly as we like it? which reality will we choose?

or is it really that we love dreaming towards some new possibility? that looking forward towards the next big thing is what we do, it's what makes us us. it's where we feel most at home, dreaming and scheming and looking at the next fork in the road and choosing which path to take. so perhaps that's my answer...we take our home with us, wherever we go. maybe it's not a place at all, but is within us. a reality that we make every day, as we live it and breathe in the possibilities.

i have to say i like that idea. and i'm looking forward to seeing how this all pans out as the picture gets clearer in the coming weeks.

* * *

and with jon stewart's daily show playing in the background, recapping last week's convention farce, i become painfully aware that my musings and considerations are luxury problems indeed.