"you never know how inside of themselves people are." i read that long ago in a barbara kingsolver novel and it's stuck with me ever since. in any given situation, you don't really know where people are coming from. maybe they've had a completely shit week. maybe it's been awesome. maybe it's been both - up and down, like any other week. maybe they've just learned they have a terminal illness. maybe their father just died. maybe their mother with alzheimer's just failed to recognize them for the first time. maybe they just lost their job. maybe they just got a new one. maybe they just learned they're pregnant. or perhaps they miscarried. maybe they're tired or have a toothache. maybe they feel lonely or sad or joyful. you just don't know. maybe the path ahead of them seems clear. or perhaps it's obscured and murky. maybe they're relieved the sun is finally shining after too many days of rain. maybe their awesome boss just quit. maybe they feel like they're in limbo. perhaps they're caught up in needless office politics. what if they have a need to be right? to be comforted? to be understood? what if they feel bewildered and alone and cast adrift? what if they are newly in love and their stomach is full of butterflies? you just don't know. you can never really know. and quite possibly they'll never really be able to tell you. but maybe what they most need from you is that you see them - really see them. no matter how inside of themselves they are.
i completed a study recently wherein i talked to a whole lot of foreigners who had, for one reason or another, made denmark their home. some came for love, some for work, some to be safe from war-torn homelands. their feelings of displacement and discomfort were remarkably similar, despite a diversity of reasons for being here. i could easily go on and on about it, but this weekend i found myself thinking about one aspect that many of them cited...that of how being in a new place where you don't speak the language and don't understand the culture makes you feel about 6 years old again.
i was fortunate to have husband when i came to denmark, so my exposure to the bewildering new set of sounds that is danish and the general coldness of the culture was cushioned a bit. but i do recall that with many things...paperwork, phone calls, directions (let's just say that the streets in denmark are not laid out in a nice neat grid like they are on the prairies of my homeland) to get places...husband helped me by taking care of things i didn't understand.
and on saturday, when a heavy maglight flashlight fell on his toe and caused it serious harm which necessitated that he sit in the chair with his foot up, trying to stop the bleeding, for most of the day, i realized that i felt rendered incapacitated myself by his injury. not because i had also hurt my toe, but because it felt like i couldn't do any of the things i had planned to do (turning our front glassed-in entryway into a makeshift greenhouse), because husband wasn't there helping me. he hadn't paved the way. the heavy pots were still out back and some of them had old, dead lemon trees in them. the plants were still sitting out back, being whipped by the wind. but he had prepared a wheelbarrow of soil, compost and perfectly aged cow poo for me the day before, so that was ready. but it took me most of the day to realize that i was perfectly capable of getting on with the task myself.
and it hit me that my reliance on him when i came to denmark, for even the simplest tasks (telling the difference between the kinds of milk at the grocery store, for example), had set the tone. i have, in many ways, stayed that child i reverted to, expecting husband to fix everything for me. and i had lost the sense of frustration that it had early on. it was probably because he took on those responsibilities so kindly and patiently, that we just slipped into our roles and stayed there. he is the eternal fixer and i am the one for whom he fixes.
but, i realized that i was perfectly capable of dumping out the old lemon trees and moving those big crocks around to the front of the house in the other wheelbarrow. and so i did it. and i filled them with stones in the bottom for drainage and that soil he had prepared and i planted tomatoes, aubergine and cucumber. and i arranged it all in the glassed-in entryway, so it can be my makeshift greenhouse this year (we're moving the real one, again, again). and almost immediately it smelled moist and fragrant and green out there. and i had a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of being capable. and the plants have perked up considerably since i took these photos immediately after i was finished, so even they're happy.
maybe it's time to let go of that 6-year-old girl again and start getting something done.
why is that having a view is so important to us as humans? there was a time, not all that long ago, when it wasn't. here in denmark, the older houses along the harsh west coast have small windows and you can see that people weren't concerned about seeing the sea. they were more concerned about keeping out the wind and the sand. in the laura ingalls wilder books, there's only one passage about how pa got a real glass window for one of the houses on the prairie and it was a tiny one. there was a time when people living along canals and rivers did their best not to see all that dirty water and waste flowing by and those living closest to it were the poorest. today, the most expensive properties brag about their view and their proximity to water. when did our view on having a view change? is it the fault of creative real estate agents? or do we as humans crave the horizon as our horizons have expanded?
we've noticed since moving out to the countryside that our neighbors who have lived here for 40 years have what to us is a curious lack of a seating area outside. if the weather is good enough (and sometimes even if it isn't), we eat outdoors. our neighbor is likely to be mowing his extensive lawn during those early evening hours when we're trying to enjoy a meal outside. but we want him to sell us his barn and a bit of land at the back of it eventually, so we don't complain. we've realized it's just a different view on what activities happen outdoors. to our neighbors, long-time farmers, outdoors is where you work and in the house is where you relax. we work indoors all day and so we want to go outdoors to relax.
we move our table all around the lawn, taking advantage of spots of sunshine (or shade) and wind directions (if we're grilling). and tho' the view of our lake isn't from the table in the garden, it's important to us that it's there. we are drawn to it and seek it out, most often in the evening, during the golden hour when the sun is sinking in the sky. an amble down to the end of the pasture to spend a few moments gazing at the lake in the quiet of the evening makes us feel restful and relaxed. the view is important to our mental well-being.
i think as our work has taken us farther from nature, we naturally are drawn to it in other ways, so we have larger windows on our homes and we move many domestic activities - like eating - outdoors when weather permits. i surely hope it's not just the manipulation of conniving real estate agents.
descending to the fifth circle of hell (wrath and sullenness)
my morning found me trudging up a staircase, following a fifty-something woman who had clearly eaten loads of garlic for breakfast, or perhaps just used it instead of perfume. i prayed frantically silently to odin that she was going somewhere else, but no, she was headed to the same classroom up on the top floor that i was. apparently odin was otherwise engaged.
because there is a gap of time between old job and new job, i have applied for unemployment benefits and one of the hoops one must jump through is to attend a two day "competence assessment" course during which one ends up with an online "CV" in a government system (the one which, if you recall, suggested after analyzing my education and experience that i do telemarketing). thus, you know that i have already placed my CV in the system on my own and am, as it were, well aware of my competence(s). so anyway, that's why i found myself following the clearly-afraid-of-vampires woman up the stairs early on a wednesday morning.
myself and 17 others were attending the day's sessions, which opened with the most patronizing 30 minutes of instructions and warnings i've witnessed in as long as i can remember. we were referred to as "unemployed welfare recipients" (very motivating) during the entire spiel, which included a whole lot of references to the apparently given fact that we were looking for jobs as chauffeurs and nursing home attendants (not that there's anything wrong with those things, but i didn't spent nine months on a fulbright in the balkans to lift old mr. hansen from his bed to his wheelchair). anyone who came in late was subjected to cutting and even more demeaning and patronizing remarks about their ability to tell time.
once i realized that i was making serious fingernail marks in the palms of my hands from holding them in fists to keep from screaming, i tuned out the capri- and thigh-length "sporty" boot-wearing woman's patronizing droning and looked around. nearly half of my fellow participants were in their upper fifties, four were clearly carpenters or bricklayers or the like, there were two who looked a bit like me and a few young women who looked like candidates for channel 4's the young mothers program.
the capri-clad woman with her asymmetrical haircut turned us over to an energetic bald man who told us straight away about his messy divorce and life with his three kids, who only spend half the month at his house. for otherwise cold, closed people, the danes surely do share some all-too personal details rather easily. he proceeded to throw every remaining scrap of political correctness out the window in what i eventually decided was a charming way (after i recovered from the shock that he outright called me an asshole for joining that more general union instead of the one for people with master's degrees). he actually said to a young girl who worked part time in a church, "what the hell does a kirketjener (her job title) do?" not really appreciating the irony of swearing about a church. i had to actually cover my mouth to restrain outright boisterous laughter at that one.
one of the women, who i thought i had spotted as a fellow academic, turned out to be a former computer programmer turned papergirl turned failed nursing student who left her 4-year nursing program after 6 years without finishing due to "ideological reasons." i came to feel real empathy for her, because i think she had a soft heart and it caused her to be unable to take the overwhelming reality of the world. on the other hand, i do think there are meds for that.
once i arranged not to be forced to go back for day two (i was clearly in the wrong room and apparently the wrong union), i sat back and enjoyed it. some of the more amusing stories that came out during the day:
~ a girl in her late 20s with two kids and no husband who wanted to be a mechanic because she liked cars (but had no training or skills in being a mechanic whatsoever and no idea how to get them. and she didn't even have a car).
~ a sweet (and very talkative) man of nearly 60 who had spent a lifetime as a salesman and had already applied for 500 jobs (he had a stack of documents to prove it).
~ a boy in his early 20s who said his ambition was to become a garbage man (after he attained the correct qualifications, including a driver's license, which he currently lacked).
~ a real asshole of a (self-declared) dyslexic bricklayer whose phone was in his coat pocket and kept ringing every 15-20 minutes all morning and who actually refused to turn it off or on silent when asked to do so (turned out he didn't know how to do it, so the future garbage man helped him out, but not until it had rung 4-5 times).
i'll admit i didn't get a whole lot out of the day, other than 11 pages of notes in my "blog about this" notebook. so perhaps it was worth it. but thank odin i don't have to go back tomorrow. so i can stay home and write some more about it, because there's so much more to share.
it's a very interesting experience, this being unemployed and encountering the social welfare system to which i've paid so dearly for so many years, both through my (rather alarmingly high) taxes and through an extra unemployment insurance called an A-kasse, through my union. although a job is on my immediate horizon, it won't start 'til april, so i need to enter the "dagpenge" or "day-money" system for a month. and in fact, having paid into the system for so long, i actually want to try it out, to see how it works. it is an interesting, frustrating and yes, even infuriating experience. and a huge eye-opener into a system that has not kept up with the reality of those facing unemployment today.
in many ways, i think it's fair enough for there to be some oversight and monitoring of people who are, as the brits put it, on the dole. so a certain amount of paperwork is fair enough. it's also fair enough that you have to be actively seeking employment so that you can rejoin the ranks of taxpayer and not payee (tho' interestingly, you ARE taxed on the money you get from the government - that's a whole 'nother issue that i won't go into at the moment).
the first thing you are asked to do is enter your "CV" into an old-fashioned and cumbersome online system called the jobnet. i am, as you know, quite good at things internet and it still took me the better part of an hour to do this. there is one point where you should give a written description of your work life thus far and the skills and talents you have to offer to an employer. sort of like you do at the top of a normal CV - a profile of yourself. however, it is limited to 250 characters, so it's kind of like the twitter version of who you are and what you want. i found this quite limiting, i must say.
at the end, after you have entered all of this, the system helpfully suggests some jobs to you that are found in its database. for me, the system admitted that it didn't have anything that matched my profile, but suggested that i have a look at several jobs that were marked as "hot" with a little red chili pepper symbol. the "hot" jobs the system suggested i apply for included: telemarketer for a mobile phone company, helper in a nursing home and yes, you guessed it, cleaning staff in a hotel. at this point, i said, aloud, WTF?
apparently the system, which forces you to spend the best part of an hour entering a whole lot of information about your work experience and education, but will not allow you to actually upload your real CV, doesn't actually know what masters degrees and ph.d. programs and fulbright scholarships and elite american universities really are. is it really relevant for me to enter my real and true information into this system that is so clearly targeted at someone on a totally different plane(t) than i am?
i realize that this sounds rather arrogant and in a way, i don't mean it to, but in a way, i do. seriously? this system was clearly developed when denmark's unemployment was for all intents and purposes nul. so anyone who was on the job market was looking for telemarketing or a cleaning job. but now, the reality is something quite different--there is a job market full of highly-educated people with extensive work experience on the market. and the system hasn't changed to reflect this.
next week, i actually must attend a two-day course which will help me determine my "competence" and then write a CV. hello, people. i could TEACH that course. without preparing in advance.
i also have to log into this ridiculous jobnet on a weekly basis and apply for two jobs. two jobs that are apparently listed there in the jobnet. so they are actually FORCING me to apply for telemarketing and cleaning jobs in order to get grocery money for one month. it makes no difference whatsoever that i have a job lined up, nor does it matter that i've paid into the unemployment insurance scheme for ten years. if i want that one month of assistance, i have to jump their hoops, because they have made the hoops the same for all.
although it gave me a serious headache mid-afternoon when i was knee-deep in all of it, i am now more relaxed and ready to take it as the sociological experiment that it is for me. a test of the system, if you will. and i'm going to do quite a lot of writing (in my journal, don't worry, i won't subject you all to all of it) about the psychological effects of such a system. i have to admit that it already feels quite defeating and psychologically damaging to enter my experience and education and have the system suggest to me that i become a telemarketer. the implications on job seekers and society at large are potentially devastating.
i'll bet this isn't the only example of a system that's broken in the face of the new economic reality.
i'm in despair once again at the state of society. it's brought on by my reading of susan sontag's on photography. every sentence of this book is packed with meaning. it's thought-provoking and stimulates the intellect in a way that i'll admit i haven't experienced in far too long. the book was written in 1977 when it seems that theory still meant something, before postmodernism got hold of it and stripped meaning of meaning. don't get me wrong, i'll admit i wholly embraced postmodernism - my shelves are filled with deleuze and guattari, derrida, baudrillard and the like. i am an educational product of the early to mid-90s, what can i say, i rolled around in the postmodernists and adored them, despite the fact that they ultimately deprived the world of any meaning at all.
as i've said before, i write in books. i scribble in the margins, i underline, i make stars and asterisks and draw little pairs of glasses where there's something i want to look up. i scrawl lightbulbs where the text gives me ideas and at times can scarcely decipher my own handwriting, so anxious i apparently was to get a thought down that it's illegible. as you can see in the shot above, sontag's on photography is full of scribblings and underlinings already and i'm only about 40 pages in. i've already got enough fodder and photo titles for my photo-a-day project for the entire month of february. but best of all, my brain is thinking again. i'm not sure when it stopped, but it had stopped. and oddly, i hadn't realized it until i picked up this book.
we were sitting at the breakfast table this morning with our tea and the sunday paper and i came across the illustration above. apparently, young people are so taken with the universe presented in james cameron's avatar that they come away from the film depressed. the blue-skinned girl, in 3D glasses is crying on her mother's knee, saying how sad she is and her mother comforts her, saying she understands, her father was the same after he'd seen all of the episodes of the brewer on DR. they're of course poking fun at this notion, but still. the fact that they've devoted a whole page of the sunday magazine to the notion that young people are depressed because they can't live within a movie, is startling. and is what makes me despair about the state of society. i think everyone should go read something real. i know i'm going to...
denmark has just wrapped up their second run of x-factor, the amateur talent show. it ends up being all about singing, and there's no evidence of other talents (not that much evidence of talent in the singing, if we're honest), so i don't know why they don't just bill it as a song contest. we didn't really watch the first time around last year, but now that sabin, at 8, has a strong will of her own and a more overt need to have a conversation around the playground equivalent of the watercooler, we've watched the last 4-5 episodes, down to the final. here's a video with the 9 finalists that competed over those weeks, just to give you a taste of the level we're talking about here:
in (no doubt contractural) obligation to the concept, they have the nice lady judge (lina) who is enthusiastic about everything, the nice producer judge (remee) who is nice to everyone and the evil judge (thomas blackman), who is nasty to all (and therefore the most entertaining). and a bunch of happy amateurs (4000) who put themselves forward for the challenge. in the end, each judge had one contestant left (they chose them in sort of teams)--a 15-year-old boy of "other ethnic background than danish" (as we put it when we're being politically correct) (his name is mohamed, if you're looking for a clue to that other ethnic b/g), a group of talentless young people who never did learn to sing together and only one of which could actually sing and a 35-year-old single mother from the farøe islands.
i know what you're thinking--it sounds like a nightmare.
mohamed could actually sing a bit, in a derivative michael jackson in the jackson 5 days kind of way and he has a super cute smile and some glimmer of what i suppose the whole show is named for. alien beat club, the group, sang as four individuals of varying (not high) degrees of talent and never got the group thing together (thankfully, blackman actually got that shot in during his final critique). linda, the single mother, has a good, mature voice, but frankly, she's fat and a bit of a diva (not in an attractive way). the whole thing was decided by SMS voting and mohamed was booted out and the awful "ABC" and linda sang a song that was written for them by the talented søren rasted of aquafame (yes, the barbie girl people). and linda won in a squeaker by 2% of the votes. which only shows that there is a slight margin of reason at work in this country (but only slight).
at our house, we have a lot of mobile phones, but thankfully, did not contribute to the voting. i was fortunate enough not to get home from norway until the very end, so i only saw the last song, which was more than enough.
my take on the whole thing is that this whole reality t.v./song contest thing has run its course (perhaps i'm just wishful thinking). there have been a number of these programs run in denmark under various names and frankly, the talent pool isn't deep enough--the country is after all, only 5 million people and 27 million pigs and as far as i can tell, they've largely (but not completely) kept the pigs from showing up for the auditions. people who can really sing already have record contracts and so you're left with a bunch of happy amateurs, which could potentially be charming if they didn't think they were the next britney spears just waiting to happen. there is a reason you weren't already singing for a living, people.
thirty or is it now forty years ago, andy warhol talked about everyone wanting their 15 minutes of fame. i'm sure he would be appalled to see what's happened today (or perhaps he'd be intrigued). he would surely revise his famous statement to 15 seconds of fame, because that's what's happened in this democratization of fame. these talent shows where the people vote are supposedly so democratic, right?
didn't people used to "vote" by buying someone's record or not buying it? isn't that market force of the vote a better indicator of talent? what happened to that? i realize that to an extent it's still there. martin, the winner of the first round of DR's x factor has faded from the scene nearly as quickly as he came onto it. i saw recently that he was going to do a mall appearance--i remember way back when when tiffany and debbie gibson did those, but that was at the beginning of their careers, not the end.
this morning on the radio, i heard linda, the winner, idealistically talking about how much control she was going to exert over her coming album. she said she wasn't a 16-year-old boy who could be pushed around like martin was. yeah, right, linda. i think you've got a rude awakening before you. when they're finished with you, you won't be eating comfort flødeboller before bed every night anymore and they'll have sucked out that spare tire you've got around your waist. she already underwent a huge transformation in appearance hairstyle-wise during the couple of months it took to do the show. i don't know what makes her think she will have any say whatsoever, just because she is a 35-year-old single mom. i've already heard the over-produced, synthesized britney-ized version of her rendition of the winning song on the radio and it's a far cry from how she actually sang it on friday night. i wonder what makes her think the album will be any different.
at least linda can sing a bit--here's her rendition of abba's money, money, money:
we simply must work on the child to upgrade her taste in television. maybe by getting rid of the t.v. altogether.
