an accidental bug for lunch

my lunch today consisted of a bug that i accidentally swallowed on my way to the car. it kind of went downhill from there. the afternoon was filled with diagrams of squares and circles and funnels and data and ways of boxing in creativity and others taking credit for ideas not their own. it was disheartening to say the least. it didn't help to get home and watch a bit of the horror show before the senate judiciary committee as a petulant, entitled manchild freaked out that his frat boy ways were found out and half of the country remained on his side. memories of a sexual assault i had buried away from even myself resurfaced. my wonderful friend cyndy is dying. and the full moon is waning. these are troubled times we are living in and it can feel pretty hopeless. especially when you have a bug for lunch.

#metoo

the whole harvey weinstein thing has opened the floodgates. i wonder why his was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back? why wasn't it last year's pussy grabbing candidate who instead was elevated to president? was it because we care more about oscar-winning actresses than we do miss universe contestants or slovenian (super?)models?

on monday, i awoke to countless posts in my facebook feed with the #metoo hashtag. the idea was that if all of us who had experienced sexual harassment or discrimination posted that, we would show the world how widespread it was.

i copied, pasted and made the post my own then deleted it, in doubt whether to post. twice. and then i thought, fuck this, we've been made to feel we can't speak for too long and now it's time to finally speak, so i posted it. adding the hashtag #misogynistdinosaurs since my particular version was more sexual discrimination than rape.

at least what i was prepared to admit both to myself and there on facebook, in that moment.

and i saw as the day progressed that my friends had copy/pasted my post, including my #misogynistdinosaurs hashtag, and i was glad i had posted. it made me feel less alone. but at the same time, i was a little shocked at how many #metoo posts were filling my feed. so many women that i know have been sexually harassed in some fashion. it's sobering.

i pondered it all day and eventually felt that i had to admit that i had hesitated to post it myself. both because i wasn't sure i wanted to admit it so publicly and because i was finding it hard to respond with an emoji to the posts that were in my feed. thumbs up seemed wrong. crying seemed too depressing and a heart emoji seemed to convey that i loved that they'd been abused. what i wanted was an emoji that would express women standing in a circle, holding one another (and i'm not a hugger, so this is big for me), in deep solidarity and sorrow over a shared experience. but facebook gives us a limited range of emoticons (and possibly emotions (undoubtedly the stuff of a different blog post)). eventually, i did settle on the heart emoji, because i felt it could also stand in for the love and support i felt towards my fellow women (there were no men in my feed admitting sexual abuse/harassment, but i do recognize that they can also be sexually abused and i would feel for them as well)).

and of course, i thought about my own instances of sexual discrimination and harassment. the first that sprang to mind was that misogynist dinosaur that i encountered in DNV, as well as the troglodyte who was both misogynist and xenophobic towards me on the local board on which i served. close behind was the mansplaining i've experienced over the past couple of years (and my whole life, actually, but it's only in the past year or so that we (women) began to put that name to it).

but the sexual harassment aspect of it also crept into my memories...that creepy asshole at the university of iowa library who was masturbating in the stacks and who made sure that i saw him. his disgusting trail of cum on the floor, dried as white droplets, visible for months afterwards in the PG section, ensuring that i couldn't forget. i reported him immediately to campus police, but they came too late to find him in his dirty old sweats and ratty hoodie. he was never caught to my knowledge, but there were multiple reports of him, i knew this because part of my college job at the local newspaper was to go to the courthouse and get the police reports. and actually, i thought of that asshole recently, when i saw dried white droplets (admittedly probably yogurt) in our stairwell at work, so i never quite shake him off. i wonder where that creep is today?

meanwhile, very good friends were openly admitting on facebook that they had been sexually abused as children, raped as young women, and harassed throughout their otherwise very successful careers. it was sickening, how much we women had endured in silence, feeling somehow guilty for what had been done to us.

sobering, i say. again.

and then i recalled how my relationship with the man who eventually became my first husband started out with an unwanted sexual situation. and i went on to date him for 7 years and yes, even marry him. and sex continued to be fraught with him throughout. and yet i must have thought that was normal, acceptable. what the fuck was i thinking? and where did i get that idea? even tho' he had forced himself on me and then wooed me with hangdog apologies, he also actually said to me that he "couldn't reconcile the good girl he wanted to see me as with a bad girl who would want to have sex." and i married that asshole? what was i thinking? how on earth did i ever think that was ok?

i'm not to the bottom of this yet, but i think it's a very good and therapeutic can of worms this #metoo hashtag has opened. #silverlining

bodil vs. sven: same storm, different name

storm outside - red velvet mocha with whipped cream (including cream cheese) on top inside.

a storm is raging outside. the incompetent danish meteorological institute (which pretty much just makes shit up as far as the weather is concerned) has dubbed it bodil (a name usually applied to middle aged women with asymmetrical haircuts wearing capri pants with three-quarter length boots). they say it's tapering off and i guess there are less creaks and groans coming from the roof at the moment, but it doesn't really seem over. a big piece of the roof of the oldest part of the house (the bit we want to tear down anyway) came off. husband was out there for over an hour on a ladder, battling some big boards into place. if a section of roof had to come off, it was a good spot, over a little "alley" between the two houses (the old part, where my kitchen is today) and the length of the house that was barn (where the new kitchen is slowly taking shape). we'll have to see it in daylight tomorrow.

unfortunately, all of the work husband did this summer, building a drying barn for his wood has come to naught, as that structure came down and now looks like kindling. he actually saw it happen, but there wasn't a thing he could do.

of course, there is much talk about the storm on facebook. one of my facebook friends expressed that he was tired of the media totally exaggerating the storm (tho' personally, i don't think they're exaggerating at all) and thought it was ridiculous that the trains were all canceled. the big bridges are closed as well and even the smaller little belt bridge is closed. i commented that it certainly wasn't exaggerated out at our place. then one of his friends remarked that well, "this time the storm was a woman, so..." remarks like that make me tired. it seems sexism is alive and well in denmark, but not in sweden, where this same storm is called sven.

catching up after an unseasonably warm monday

unseasonably warm temperatures have the birds around here singing like it's spring, the mushrooms and other fungi going crazy, the raspberries continuing long after they are usually finished and it's even confused a few of the strawberries, which are blossoming again. and here we thought global warming was a bad thing.

* * *

the child is home from russia and she had a wonderful time, tho' she says she doesn't think we should go there for a family vacation (it might be a case of been there, done that syndrome). highlights were the circus and a fabulous piece of cake she had in an old theatre turned café. after all my worries, it all turned out ok (tho' she admitted that the rhino was no fun when he was stressed, which was most of the time). i'm glad i had those flight numbers in the end, so that i knew her flight home was delayed by half an hour. it's not that much fun hanging out at midnight in billund airport.

* * *

just saw a piece in the local newspaper about a recent wine tasting evening for women. like in english, there is but a small difference between the words wine and whine (vin - hvin) and our local journalist didn't hesitate to use it in characterizing the evening, adding insult to injury in the headline by referring to it as a henhouse on top of it all. aren't we beyond such sexism disguised as smug cuteness on the part of male journalists? sadly, apparently we are not.

* * *

i want need a projecteo!

welcome to denmark, now shut up and eat your smørrebrød

there are a lot of things i don't understand.

like how if slightly older men present something and you ask questions about it, they try, almost immediately, to write you off as a.) a woman, b.) a foreigner and if those don't work, c.) a bitch. you are present at the meeting on the same footing as they are and should therefore have the same rights they do to be part of the process and ask questions. in fact, that's the whole idea. the idea is to have a well thought-through decision made, based on good information and good arguments. and not just hand the design of the building to the chairman of the group. (or have i somehow misunderstood?)

i also have trouble understanding how someone can go on and on about the fabulous design of a new library/culture house in copenhagen and then when it's discussed that the group go to look at such buildings in other towns, and you suggest the much-praised building, the whole room recoils in horror. because it's in...(gasp) copenhagen. and that's (gasp) on the devil's island, which may as well be the moon, or possibly the very inner circle of hell.

and further, i utterly fail to grasp how someone can say, when you are in fact, an immigrant, that the aforementioned building (which he brought up in the first place) isn't relevant because it has to serve (gasp) immigrants. and i should note that the word "immigrant" - invanderer - in danish has taken on an extremely negative connotation in the past decade.

one more thing i fail to grasp is how you can fail to bring enough copies of a really important document to the meeting, when you know ahead of time precisely how many people will be attending the meeting. and how when you, in fact, are ONE copy short, you are entirely unapologetic about it and when asked, at the end of the meeting, if you're going to send a copy to the person who didn't get one, you refer to her as an "old witch" to her face. 

so let's review - i'm an old witch of a damn foreigner.

welcome to denmark.

but to get serious for a moment, why on earth is it even still possible more than a decade into the 21st century, for men to be able to write off the intelligent questions of an intelligent woman and brand her a bitch for asking them? and what can we (and by we i mean me) do about it?

edited:  this makes me feel so much better. thank odin for the new york times.