how will we ever get through this?

we saw this sickening sight when we visited the national building museum two days after the inauguration funeral.
they have hosted 19 inaugural balls since the late 1800s.

as we landed yesterday in billund, the final leg of my long journey home, i listened to an inane conversation in a thick, countryside danish accent taking place behind me as i scanned the front page of the new york times i grabbed from the rack as i left paris. my eyes filled with tears as i felt very intensely that mid-atlantic feeling - the one where i feel i belong neither here nor there.

the damage wrought by donald trump in one short week is incomprehensible. as i checked in for my flight home to denmark at washington dulles, on the floor below, people with valid green cards and visas were being turned back on the basis of their religion and nationality. on the way to the airport, my uber driver from ghana told me about how he was going to finish his master's and go back to ghana (he had been in the u.s. for 25 years and even had citizenship). in line for security and again on the train to the terminal, i had a pleasant chat with two muslim women about how sensitive the security machines are - they even picked up the little metal ends of a cord on my dress and i had to be patted down as a result. we parted ways and wished one another a pleasant journey. i didn't think to ask where they were from and i hope that they will be allowed back in if that's what they want.

i feel that much of what's happening renders me speechless - i can't find the words to express how embarrassed, mortified and powerless it all makes me feel. so i obsessively read the words of others - on facebook, on the nytimes and washington post, on blogs and such - voraciously consuming other people's words. and feeling that i no longer recognize the country of my birth. and it's only. been. one. week.

how will we ever get through this?

to be or not to be (danish)

a friend on facebook shared an interesting article yesterday. it's an interview with a german journalist who has lived in denmark for 15 years, is married to a dane and is raising danish-german children. unfortunately for most of my readers, it's in danish. but, i'll tell you the gist of it. the rhetoric in today's denmark is much like that in the uk, which recently precipitated their brexit vote - anti-immigration, anti-foreigner. when i came to denmark 18 years ago, it was easier, today, you have to put an obscene amount of money in a bank account and pass a high level danish test to achieve permanent residence. in my day, you married a dane, met up once a year at the immigration office for two years and then after three years, you were a permanent resident. in those days, there was talk of integration, not assimilation. that's all changed. the danish justice minister recently said that anyone coming here should "adopt danishness," with the implication that our original cultures should be obliterated and we should just give ourselves over to being danish (he's a bit thin on what exactly that entails, but it has something to do with paying taxes, eating pork and thinking christmas is december 24).

and like marc-christoph wagner, the german in the article, i think "no way!" i am, in many ways, less american than i once was, in the sense of being less loud, outgoing and open to talking to strangers. but where i was raised is imprinted in me in ways that i can never change. i just have to hear a cars song and i am transported to teenage summer nights, driving around with friends, singing along, the radio glowing green in the wide front seat of the car, windows open. talking about everything and nothing. sometimes all it takes is a scent to touch something deep inside me, triggering a flood of memories and a sense of who i was and where i grew up. while i have memories and songs and scents from denmark that do that for me as well after all these years, i can never and never want to, be free of the ones that stem from the culture where i grew up. to want to take that away and replace it with pork rinds and thinking that christmas is the 24th would be to try to erase who i am. not to mention that i don't even think it's possible.

i was thinking the other day, as i biked 16km across copenhagen (the stuff of another blog post), that denmark has changed a lot in the 18 years i've been here. when i came, people were more open, more prone to public nudity (sprawling out in their underwear in the parks and cemeteries at the first rays of sunshine), more rebellious (they had the highest percentage of women smokers in the developed world). it was ok to be proud of what you did for a living, whether you worked in an office or on an assembly line. that's all changed. now it's scandalous to go topless on a beach, men are hardly allowed to work in kindergartens for fear that if they hugged a crying child to comfort them, they would be seen as pedophiles. and everyone wants a career and not just a job. and there's a big rise in nationalist rhetoric and xenophobia. a few months ago, it was perfectly ok to stand on an overpass and spit down on the refugees as they come in, as some danes did down at the border with germany.

i realize it's not just denmark. it seems that the zeitgeist of the moment is right wing extremist madness. those with less education and less money are frightened and pressured all over the world and they are speaking out with their bigoted viewpoints and votes. it's what caused the brexit vote and the rise of a clown like donald trump. and it's why even politicians who once seemed sensible are saying increasingly awful things in the interest of remaining in power.

and as usual, i find myself out in the middle of the atlantic, wanting to feel neither danish nor american.

magical thinking

magical thinking. that illogical connection of disparate events in the mind. i think it's hard not to do it sometimes, both with good and bad things. the sparkle unicorn fairy waved her wand and the sun burst through the clouds at last. i stuffed her in my dark pocket and it clouded up and began to rain. a lump of adorable plastic does not have the power to make the sun come and go. i know that rationally, but sometimes you can't help but look for connections.

i wrote on facebook a week or so ago that i had a longing for people to just spontaneously drop by. right after, two different friends did so. there was arguably an actual cause and effect relationship there since they had read my post on facebook. but since then a couple of random folks have also dropped by. a charmingly toothless man, wearing an old-fashioned helmet and driving an ancient moped (words you never thought you'd see strung together) stopped by to see if we still had a saw for sale that was listed on our craig's list equivalent. i had a surprisingly delightful and funny conversation with him that gave me happy energy for several hours afterwards.

then, last evening, as i wandered the garden in the golden hour sunlight that the unicorn sparkle fairy had called forth, another stranger parked in front of the house and came up to me. he asked if he might try fishing in our lake one day. we chatted a bit and i agreed that he could. now, he and a friend just came and knocked on the door to say they were going to give it a try (despite the steady drizzle caused by the unicorn sparkle fairy still being in my coat pocket). i don't know his name and i'm probably not going to invite him over for dinner, but these are exactly the kind of random human encounters that i have been missing. have they come to me because i put it out there in the world that i wanted them? or would they have happened anyway?

who really knows? magical thinking.

feeling the moment

a slightly disgruntled molly surveys the world around her. she's not super keen on all those other cats that seem to be milling around the place, so she's got a slightly sardonic look. but i admire how she lives completely in the moment, just feeling what she feels and experiencing what she experiences. she does have expectations - that breakfast and dinner will be provided, that there will be some petting and rubbing under her chin when she desires it. on her terms. and when she's not pleased with those other cats, they get the occasional bop on the head with a lightning quick paw or else she climbs the nearest tree to put some distance between them and her.

now, i'm not advocating going around bopping people on the head, but i am advocating just feeling what it is you're feeling in a given moment. when, last evening at the choir, i felt i wasn't accepted and welcome, there is validity to that feeling. something (several somethings, in fact) did provoke me to feel that way, it was real and so were my hurt feelings. so all of the explanations and making light of them and saying, "that's not how it was meant" (because apparently no one really wants to be xenophobic, they just do it for fun) do not actually change the reality of how i felt in that moment. and i'll admit i feel a bit resentful of not just being allowed to feel what i feel. why do people always try to talk you out of it, instead of accepting your right to your reactions and to how you feel? feelings are valid in the moment. while they may not always be right or grounded in the intentions of those who provoked them, they are real. and to recognize that reality is the only way to process them and get through them. whether it takes a bop on the head (including your own sometimes), or whether it just takes running off and climbing a tree to absent yourself from a situation, feelings need to be experienced for what they are.

expectations will kick you every time

i am in need of a bit of wonder woman's fearlessness at the moment.

i put myself in a situation this evening which made me realize that i'm still feeling pretty wounded. i went with a friend to sing with a little countryside gospel choir. i went with high hopes to be energized and filled with happiness by soulful gospel music and i'm afraid that didn't happen. and to be honest, i didn't know that i expected that until it didn't happen. expectations can really ruin things.

it started with the usual round of shaking everyone's hand, which always wrong-foots me. it's an aspect of danish culture that i never really get used to or comfortable with. going around a room, shaking hands with strangers and saying your name is, in fact, a really good idea, but it makes me wildly uncomfortable, even after all these years. then, i ended up standing with my friend, who was standing with the sopranos. i'm an alto and was told, rather rudely, in my opinion, that i needed to go to the other side. we hadn't been singing in parts at the time and crossing the half circle, in front of everyone, after being rather summarily sent over there, felt like a statement on my singing ability. "get over there because i can't stand the sound of your voice next to me." it probably wasn't meant that way, but it definitely felt that way.  and it took me awhile to talk myself out of my prickly reaction. truthfully, i never fully shook it off, especially as it felt like the part of the circle i found myself in kept pushing me back and kept me a step out of it.

the songs we were singing didn't help. they were all unfamiliar, difficult arrangements and for the first one, we didn't have the music. i'm a music reader. i need to see the actual notes on the page, i don't do well just listening and humming along at first. and it wasn't like the others knew the songs either, they were new for all. and it wasn't the warm, familiar songs i had expected. see, there're those expectations again. they creep in, even when you don't even know they're there, spoiling the experience.

the second song should have been familiar (happy day), but it was a new arrangement that was very different and difficult. at least we had the music to look at, but with three parts - soprano, alto and tenor, and varying ability of those there to follow the sheet music, i felt bewildered at times, thinking i was the only one in the room reading the actual notes on the page and that all of the others were in on this alternative method of reading music that i didn't know about. leaving me once again feeling vulnerable and slightly rejected.

not what i wanted to feel at the gospel choir.

i wanted to enter a room of people who were open and warm, or who had been opened up and warmed through by the familiar, energizing gospel music of my cultural background (this was a reasonable expectation, right?). because although i am a midwestern white girl, i do know gospel music when i hear it. and i wanted to give myself over to that energy and soul and warmth. and it simply wasn't there in a little parish house in denmark full of middle aged white women and a couple of men. and i am undoubtedly a middle-aged white woman as well, so maybe i shouldn't talk. but, i think you can take the gospel out of the US, but you can't retain the soul of it so far from its origins, especially if you have danish composers creating their disjointed version of it. one song was seriously like four very different genres smooshed together into one and it was downright disorienting. again, not the energy and comfort i was looking for.

tonight, i was reminded that i am wounded and it made me sad. and left me with that old familiar mid-atlantic feeling. i'll grant that i would be too white trying to sing with a real gospel choir in the states, but i can't even fit in with one here. so i'm left alone, somewhere in between.

i don't know why in these moments that i can't summon the energy to dive in and sing along on the happy day solo part, giving some of the energy to the room that i was wishing it would give to me. i don't know where my confidence has gone. and i don't really know how to recover it.

my inner wonder woman, where are you when i need you?

stream of consciousness

seriously, wtf? (even molly thinks so)
and she's also a transplant from the midwest.

when you live your life outside of the culture of your birth, no matter how "integrated" and part of things you think you are, there will always be moments where you are smacked up side of the head with the big old stick of feeling you don't belong. it can happen at the grocery store, in traffic, at lunch, at work, when people are late for a meeting or oddly if the stewardess skips your drinks order on a plane. but it's very worst of all when it happens in your home, among those you love and have chosen as your family. and the problem is that you can never really know when that feeling will strike. it's a feeling borne of a complex combination of factors and there's no way that i've found to predict when that combination will be exactly right, or rather, wrong, and it will hit you that you are still an outsider. and when it hits you, everything is magnified. the smallest thing becomes enormous and has the capacity to grow and grow in your mind, crowding out any of the feelings of belonging you may have harbored, and convincing you that they were never real. it's quite horrible, actually. especially because of how little it takes and how that thing can be so random and so subject to the fragile barometric pressure of feelings and hormones and possibly wind speed and temperature and butterflies in the amazon rainforest and the price of corn futures on the chicago exchange. and it's so distressing that all you've built up over such a long time can be so easily smashed and you feel like you're starting all over again and you wonder if you even want to. but you probably aren't, it just feels like that in the moment itself and the moments that follow. but it likely won't last and even as you're in the middle of it and you realize it's a complicated combination of the obliviousness your husband has to extended family matters generally (which is different than not caring, tho' it's hard to see that when you're in this place) and your own sadness that some of those you considered your favorite family members didn't come to sabin's party or even send her a card or offer a proper explanation of their absence, plus your chosen displacement from the culture of your birth and possibly a teency weency touch of pms thrown into the mix, you still find it very hard to be rational and non-emotional about the whole thing. all he had to do was tell you he received a text that his sister had a new baby girl and it would never have happened. this whole strange avalanche of tears and emotions and being reminded that you're an outsider could easily have been avoided, if only you knew what would trigger it. and ironically, you can't even learn from the situation, because something else entirely will trigger it next time. and you'll ride the roller coaster again. and you'll get through it. and probably the good bits of life wouldn't seem so good without the bits that seem pretty awful. and maybe that mid-atlantic feeling is just a permanent state of being.

epic fail on the first assignment

i'm participating in kylie bellard's fortnight of self-adoration for the next two weeks. she sends a daily "assignment" and there's a facebook group that's full of good, positive energy. i'm enjoying it. although i've already utterly failed at the first mission.

here's what it was (quoting exactly, capital letters and all):

While you’re going about your day today, look at another person whom you’ve never seen before.

Take a few moments to glance at them, and contemplate the fact that this person has had hard experiences, just like you have. This person has cried, and felt angry, and felt like they messed up, and been self-critical at one time or another. This person has felt afraid, too.

What’s it like to take the time to notice that someone else has an inner life that’s just as nuanced as your own?

my first failure on it was that i didn't do it on monday, as assigned. i've lead a hermit-y life for a couple of days and haven't really left the house much or been in contact with any people i didn't know (it's a small town i live in, so sue me). this failure i can forgive myself for.

today, i had a chance to try to do this and i even had a perfect opportunity, where to be able, even if just for a moment, to understand where the other person was coming from would have really helped me. but i simply was unable to do it. and not to defend myself, but allow me to explain.

we moved our horse to a new stable at the beginning of july. the main reason being that it's much closer to home, so it's much easier for us to pop over there. matilde spent the summer out on grass in the pasture and we haven't been over to ride much since we moved her. she needed time off and so did sabin. since school starts tomorrow and there's a nip of fall in the air, we decided it was time to, quite literally, get back in the saddle again.

we didn't really see anyone there when we arrived. some girls were being picked up from a riding camp, but then it was pretty quiet. we saddled up and sabin rode in the outdoor arena. as she was nearly done, a woman walked towards us. she was still some distance away, but i turned and said "hi." to which she responded by turning around and going the other way. i heard her daughter say, "who was that, mom?" and she said, "they must be the new (people)." (people is in parentheses because she didn't actually say it, she just said, "they must be the new," which can be said in danish,  tho' frankly, it isn't very nice.) but we apparently didn't rate a greeting or a chat or even a direct question to find out who we were. apparently that extra 20 feet she would have had to walk to have a small conversation with me was too much.

now, i'm quite accustomed to this sort of treatment after 15 years in denmark, but honestly, there are days, like today, where it really gets under my skin. mostly because i can never make myself understand it. she was walking in our direction, looking fully like she intended to say hello, but when i turned and said hello and she realized she didn't know me, she turned heel and went the other way, without so much as saying hello back. this isn't unusual. but it makes no sense to me. we are both at a stable, we both have daughters, we must both live in the area, so we actually have quite a lot in common, even if we don't know one another. so why couldn't she even say hello to me? especially when i said it to her first?

i tried to put myself inside her head, to contemplate what experiences she had that brought her to the point where she's unable to even have a common sense of politeness towards someone that she's never met before? is it shyness? is it arrogance? is it not wanting to be an inconvenience to me? or to herself? is it that i look like i would bite? or that i might smell bad (she was too far away to know that when she turned back)? was she afraid i didn't speak danish (sabin and i weren't talking at that moment, so she couldn't have heard us speaking english)? is there just a cultural chasm i can't cross? what was it? why couldn't she even say hello to me when i said it first to her?

i feel it as such a negation of my humanity. even as i try my hardest to fight that feeling, reminding myself that it couldn't possibly be about me, because she didn't know anything about me at all. but the fact is that she also didn't want to. she had no interest in me once she realized she didn't know me. and i can't stop myself from feeling hurt by that. nor can i get inside of her head and try to understand it. i simply don't understand. but i also have a hard time thinking that it's really my failure. short of running after her and insisting on introducing myself, what else could i have done?

worst was, it didn't just ruin that moment, but it put me in a bad, irritated mood for the rest of the evening. i snapped at my family. i sighed big sighs. i was exasperated with everything. i felt impatient and restless throughout an evening meeting. it made me uncomfortable in my own skin. i'd love to be able to let go and to understand, but it feels pretty beyond me at this moment in time.

toto, we're not in kansas anymore

during my usual sunday morning troll of the internet, i watched this wonderful TED talk by pico iyer on the subject of home:

as one who is by choice displaced, i often ponder what home means. quite often here on this very blog. i think that instead of getting easier to answer, the longer you are gone from home (your original home, the place of your birth), the more muddied the waters become. you begin to feel that place isn't home and this place, where you live and make your life and even find a lot of happiness, sometimes even on a daily basis, definitely isn't home either. and it leaves you all with what i like to call my mid-atlantic feeling (as in cast adrift in the middle of the atlantic, neither here nor there). and it is, as always, a lonely feeling, tho' it can also leave you feeling utterly unique and who doesn't, especially in their moments of private solipsism, want to feel unique, even if it unique in your own particular brand of lonely.

and so i struggle with notions of home. and making a home. and feeling at home. and maybe it's a normal state if 220 million of us are living outside the country of our birth, as iyer suggests. so maybe i should just lighten up and go with it. because this makes me sound like i'm unhappy and i'm far from that. i just don't really know if i know what home is in this age when so much is in flux. it's where you keep your important books, i thought at one time, but when our books now fit on an iPad, then home is wherever i find myself (provided i have my iPad with me) by that definition.

i suppose, as iyer says, i somehow do manage to stitch together a sense of home (and thus identity), from the various pieces i carry around inside me...where i was raised, where i live now, all of the places i have traveled, all of the experiences i've had, all of the memories i've created. i carry it all within me, no matter where i am. and my actual house is filled with things gathered on those travels...trinkets, statues, glassware, rugs, scarves, so it reflects that sense of home that i attempt to construct, almost unconsciously. and what is a home? a nest, a place to feel safe. a place to call your own. a place to house your important books. and i can't complain because i do have that, even if i couldn't have imagined how it would look and what it would be like, had you asked me to do that 20 years ago.

and so i muddle along, like so many others, constructing a life, a home, a family and filling it with deeds and memories.

reverting to childhood helplessness

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.

certifying identity

i've not done a whole lot more on my torso since the weekend of the project. something holds me back, tho' i think about it all the time. i think i fear a little bit that i'll not be able to tap into that energy that arose when the group was together, working on the same thing when i'm at home all alone. but i also have been busy with other things and i do have faith that it will come in good time.

the only "requirement" of the project was that we all place a copy of our birth certificate on the back of the torso, so they would have that one element of commonality when we exhibit them. all along, i've been quite uncomfortable with that notion on some intuitive level that i can't really articulate. i have a feeling of it as some kind of official stamp (of approval? existence?) that i find doesn't really have a place in how i envision myself at this moment in time - the torso is, after all, a self-portrait.

then, i came across a passage in harold rosenberg's book about saul steinberg. he says, "official documents are among the most stylized elements in modern society. passports, drivers' licenses, bonding stamps, ID cards change very little." and it hit me that this has something to do with my objection to affixing my birth certificate to the torso. you see, i've changed a lot since then. and although it's arguably a formal trace of myself, i object on some gut level to the formality of it - to the official stamp of existence of it, to the unchangeability of it.

perhaps it also has something to do with the issue of displacement, which i have often pondered and which is in my consciousness again as i read salman rushdie's joseph anton biography.  i have chosen to live outside the country of my birth and that causes a rift with my old identity. identity is often grounded in place and time and people and work and when all of those change, you do too. in forging a new one (that is never truly of the new place you've chosen either), you leave behind some of the old, breaking with it. i think that documentation of identity represented by a birth certificate is too strong a reminder of that break. and leaves me acutely conscious that i am cast adrift somewhere in the mid-atlantic - neither fully here nor there.

so my birth certificate is there, on the inside. but in the end, it will probably be mostly covered over - hidden beneath, forming the foundation of the layers, but changed by what comes after. and perhaps that's as powerful a statement as displaying it for all to see.

beyond logic and reason

last friday, south dakota's governor signed a bill which will allow teachers to carry firearms into their K-12 classrooms in the state of my birth. the bill does not mandate that teachers carry a firearm, but it authorizes an ominously-named "sentinel" who has had training (ala law enforcement training), to carry a gun on school premises. (you can see a whole list of all the bills he signed on friday here - there is probably reason to be alarmed on numerous counts, but that's another story.)

when i first read it in a new york times facebook post on friday, my initial reaction was a flush of embarrassment. people know i'm originally from south dakota and they will ask me about it, holding me responsible, taking me to task (tho' i haven't voted in south dakota for years (i vote in illinois, as it was the last state where i lived before moving to denmark)). but people took me personally to task back in the era of the monica lewinsky saga - "what are you doing to your president?" ("what monica did, given the chance," was always my pithy answer). alas i have no pithy answer for this one.

after a couple of days of thinking, my embarrassment hasn't abated. mostly, i think that south dakota was duped into this by a clever gun lobby. they got some numbskull of a freshman member of the house to introduce the bill, fed him a bunch of lines about it making schools safer, especially rural, isolated schools (where, to my knowledge, there have been no shootings) and some ego-stroking about being on the leading edge of the arming teachers movement and the republican-controlled legislature and governor steamed it right through. without thought or substantive debate. and frankly, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. and if they're not, i'm certainly feeling ashamed enough for them too.

even the largest newspaper in the state, the sioux falls argus-leader (which my parents refer to as the scene of the crime, since they met there), hasn't had a single editorial on the topic (at least not that i can find online). and they too should be ashamed of themselves.

a powerful gun lobby pushes such an detestable piece of legislation through in a conservative, sparsely-populated state and thinks it will start a domino effect of legislation in other states. and sadly, they're probably right. because we now live in a world where we legislate our to alleviate our fears. lawmakers are reactive, not proactive. but all of the legislation in the world can't prevent the lunacy of an individual with easy access to firearms.

these school shootings that have been happening (for years now - i remember one in the early 90s when i was a student at the university of iowa) are tragic and horrible and shouldn't happen. but how anyone can think that ensuring that there are guns present in a school can possibly help is simply beyond my ability to logically comprehend.

word for the day: solipsism

solipsistic. that's the word i would choose as the predominant descriptor of the danes. it's a word i first encountered in college, as applied to dostoevsky's underground man, a character so utterly fixated on himself that he cannot function in the world. or even see it. while the danes are solipsistic in a different way than the underground man (he's quite absorbed in philosophy and existential questions), they are self-absorbed nonetheless, to the point of often not realizing that others exist.

this manifests most often in public space. drivers stick to the middle of the road, seemingly unaware that there are other cars coming towards them. someone backs out of their space in a crowded grocery store parking lot, blissfully oblivious to the existence of other cars and people and carts bustling around them.  the same is true inside the grocery store, where they look up in annoyed surprise when they run over your foot, wondering where on earth you materialized from and without a polite apology ever leaving their lips. this solipsism is the same force that made countless grown adults walk on, not saying a word, as a young boy was pummeled on the street in broad daylight. a sense of being so much in and of oneself, that no one else is needed and therefore there's no need to help or acknowledge others.

it's one of the most bewildering and infuriating things about living in denmark. and i never really get used to it, tho' i am sure that i have to an extent taken on the behavior myself - grown colder and more closed and abrupt. it makes me sad to think of it at times, but it's also exhausting to try to fight it.

interesting, i had what i thought was a funny rant about this in my head when i sat down to write this, but it came out much more sad than i imagined. writing is like that sometimes.

~~~

i don't read a word of french, but if you like stitching, there is some serious eye candy here.

on expatriation and culture and landing in the mid-atlantic

some of the projects we have in the pipeline have me thinking about how shaped by culture, one's own and the one in which one finds oneself, we are. defined. how it locks us in boxes and leaves us feeling superior (or inferior) because of it. and how mind-numbingly LIMITING that all is...on both sides.

i stumbled across a blog written by an american who made the move to sweden. it's on sweden.se, a cool site that the swedish institute runs in english - all about living in sweden (wish denmark would have had such a thing back when the internet was in its infancy and i moved here). it got me thinking about all those things that i thought were so alien when i first moved to denmark. some of them still puzzle me, but i've actually gotten used to a lot in the 14-ish years i've been here.

~ i remember my first time in a grocery store, scrambling as i realized there was no one there to pack my groceries and not only did i have to do it myself, i had to PAY for the bag to put it in!

~ when i arrived in denmark in the late 90s, mobile phones were still rather a luxury item in the us - mostly doctors and other important people had them, people with their own cars. i remember being shocked to see people on the bus talking on their mobile phone. if you could afford a phone, what on earth were you doing on public transportation? (i had a lot to learn, both about public transportation and about mobile phones.)

~ the sight of a man in a suit, riding a bicycle and smoking a cigarette. in my mind, a bicycle was for exercise, not necessary transport, and who would smoke or wear a suit while exercising?

~ people treating cemeteries as parks, laying out in their bra and underwear in the first rays of spring sunshine on a towel with their bike leaned up against h.c. andersen's grave, catching some rays and drinking a beer.

~ public nudity. this one was technically in sweden, but as the ferry pulled into landskrona, there was a row of colorful little houses along the waterfront and a bunch of naked swedes were jumping in and out of the water from the doorways of the little bathing houses.

~ no one ever holding a door open for you if you were coming along behind them. it got so bad, i thought that they were actually waiting to strategically drop it in my face for the most profound rudeness effect. later, i realized that many danes, if they didn't meet you when they went to kindergarten with you, actually lack the ability to see you at all. it's kind of a like you're wearing an invisibility cloak.  this is one of those things i never get used to, it still surprises me and sometimes even hurts my feelings - i just can't help it.

~ signs with the word "fart" on them. in an elevator: i fart. along the roadside: fart kontrol. i thought the danes were obsessed with flatulence and i thought they were pretty darn organized to think they could control it. but it turned out to mean motion or speed - so the elevator was in motion when the i fart sign was lit. and the fart kontrol was a friendly warning that a cop (or just an unmanned van or camera) with radar was just ahead, so you'd better stop driving like a maniac.

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speaking of expats in denmark, i made a new blog friend!

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and speaking of denmark.
film is a powerful medium.

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you have to see what kit lane made of the lila hairball we gave her.
utterly fabulous.

giving thanks

tho' the danes have sadly not realized that thanksgiving is the best holiday (they still think it's christmas, which they actually celebrate on christmas eve), i am determined to be thankful today anyway. so i hereby declare that i am thankful for:

~ husband. he's a keeper. (i think i might have mentioned that before.)

~ sabin. i thought i'd be freaked out to see her getting so tall and wearing mascara and hogging the flat iron, and locking the bathroom door, but i'm not. she's exactly the age she should be. and it's a pleasure to see her growing up and thinking for herself. i'm in awe.

~ the kittens. six weeks must be the cutest age.

~ that i've taken a photo every day since may 2008.

~ going to a play with a group of friends on saturday.

~ being involved in my community.

~ horses. they ground me and keep me sane.
~ good books.
~ moments in the kitchen, making good food.
~ staying up late with friends, drinking wine and laughing.

~ ideas, solutions, opportunities.

~ being provoked to think - by the radio, the newspaper, the interwebs, by people around me.

~ new friends. and old ones.

~ creativity that seems to be coming back to me.

~ living the right life.

i wish you all a very happy thanksgiving!

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the c boards on pinterest: camera porn, cat person, ceramics, clever cookie, color, converse, crazy chicken lady, cupcakes are not muffins (but they might be cake), cutie patootie.

molding the territory of my own belonging

"i began to work the clay of my own life again, to mold the territory of my own belonging." - david whyte, crossing the unknown sea. 

i'm reading david whyte's crossing the unknown sea: work and the shaping of identity. i have this notion that we come to the books we need to read at the moment we need to read them. and if we come to them at the wrong time, they don't speak to us (the snow child is just not doing it for me and i'm going to return it to the library without finishing it). it's not the book's fault, it's something within. but when the book and your need align, hello! it's magical.

my encounter with last evening's troglodyte reminds me that i have spent a number of years trying not to be defined by what i do for a living. this is partially because i think that the nature of work is changing and partially because i don't think that my work (or my car or my house) is who i am, i'm far too complex for that.

thus, i only reluctantly listed my current (and several former) workplaces in my mini-bio on our group website because i have come to feel that it is expected of me. plus, the things i have done lend credibility to me and my story. no one in denmark can bring themselves to look down on someone who worked for denmark's biggest, most revered company and people also have respect for those who have their own business. so i have ended up in a position where i felt like i had to list those things to be considered legitimate. otherwise, i'm just some foreigner trying to horn in on local business. (if you can make out danish, you'll notice that many of the members have listed how long they're lived in town to boost their credibility.)

for two years, i answered the question of "what do you do?" with a list of the many things that fill my days - horses, kittens, chickens, cooking, laundry, writing, photographing, gardening, conversations, thinking, volunteering, sharing, laughing...but people look at you like you're mental when you do that. a few got it, but mostly, they acted like they thought my danish was bad and i had misunderstood the question. that begins to eat away at you after awhile, so you just revert to custom. perhaps i gave up too easily.

maybe it's time to begin to work the clay of my own life again, to mold the territory of my own belonging.

changes in attitude, changes in latitude

it's kind of ironic that those who most love to travel and experience the world can be the most closed and protectionist of their personal tribe once they get back home. i wonder why that is? i've been thinking about it all day and i can't come up with an answer.

drawing the line

sometimes, you just have to draw a line and say, i go here and no farther. and sometimes, you have to realize that it goes both ways. and the line is drawn for you, here and no farther. and when that happens at a time when you've used masses of energy, you can also reach your own internal line and just that one small step over it makes everything deflate and the tears come and you just can't help it, because there's no more energy left. and that's just life. and tomorrow will be another day and you will get your energy back and go on...drawing lines and having lines drawn. and feeling that mid-atlantic feeling and trying to make sense of it all. and it won't always make sense. and there will be tears again. but it will be ok. it always is. life is messy and wonderful and full of both tears and laughter and ultimately, we wouldn't have it any other way.

minnesota nice or things i like about the states

i had no idea that my promise to share a list of good things about the US would cause such a fit of writer's block.  i've found myself sitting at the computer, blogger compose window open, daily for a week and nothing comes out.  in some sense, it's not fair, because there are good things about the US and it's not really for a lack of those. maybe it's just easier (and more amusing) to write about the negatives or the puzzling things (tho' frankly the positives can at times be equally puzzling). but here goes...

things that are great about the states:

~ target. i've had serious withdrawals from the bountiful variety at fair prices and which also gives back to their communities and isn't evil and contains a starbucks as you come in wonder that is a target store. tho' i wasn't that keen on what was apparently their $200 rule - as in, you can't leave without spending at least $200. the trick was to avoid spending the lot of it on nail polish alone. we didn't always succeed.

~ minnesota nice. i learned this term from my friend lisa. it describes those pleasant little conversations that you have with clerks in stores...whether it's about the odd-looking handful of coins you're pawing through to find some quarters or about how you're turning down their store credit card because they don't have any stores near where you live or about what exactly you're going to do with that quinoa or where you got those fabulous sequined uggs. it's a positive interchange and gives such a boost of energy in your day. of course, it's maybe not fair to credit it entirely to minnesota (tho' it IS a marked phenomenon there, even in the big city of minneapolis), as my sister and i had one of those uplifting experiences in our local grocery store right in our hometown in south dakota.

it was the day molly got her shots and her rather brutal ear mite treatment. her vet appointment was at 1:30 and i thought it would take like 15 minutes tops, so everyone was waiting for me to return with her so we could go swimming at the river (sans cat, of course). the appointment took much longer thanks to the ear mites, so by the time i got home, the three children were melting (literally, as it was 107°F/42°C) and whining like crazy. we stopped by the grocery store for snacks (and crisp, refreshing american light beer) and the sweet young girl at the cash register said, "how are you guys doing?" in her best local accent (think the coen brothers film fargo). we responded that no one was whining, no one was complaining, no one has asked 56 times whether we were going to the river and no one had begged for any junk food or candy. and in the process, those things started to be true...and we started to laugh and our stress melted away. all because the girl at the cash register acknowledged us with a greeting.

let me tell you, the danes could learn something from this.

i was talking to a canadian friend (who also lives in denmark) about this the other day. she's a sociologist, so she's thought about it a bit more than i had (hard to believe, i know). i said that i missed those light-hearted, surface conversations with clerks or others in line at the store and told her how much i'd appreciated them while we were in the US. she said she thought they were actually deeper than they appear at first. that when the young very pierced and tattooed clerk in the gas station's eyes light up when he sees your funny coin with the hole in the center and hearts around the edge and begins to tell you about foreign coins in his collection, he's revealing something more about himself...dreams of travel to far-away places perhaps, or a hint at the desire that despite having had ALL of his front teeth sharpened into vampire-like points, he wants something more from life.

which brings me to the next good thing...

~ believing something more is possible. i know that the american dream has come to be a bit ridiculed around the world in the face of financial crisis and political buffoonery. but that pie-in-the-sky belief that if you just try hard enough, you'll succeed and get what you want remains strong in americans. but isn't there something charming about it as well? and something optimistic and hopeful? i think (especially in the upper midwest) there are still a lot of people who believe that if they work hard enough, they can change their lives for the better. not everyone thinks they can take the reality t.v. shortcut to success (tho' it may seem like that sometimes).

however, the american dream is a double-edged sword and has resulted in the bewildering acceptance by the poorest for the concentration of wealth being in the hands of the few, some of whom apparently would like to be president (just not the ones one wishes would (say that three times fast)). it's because everyone has a core of belief inside them that they could make it too and once they're also there, they surely don't want to have to pay a bunch of taxes.

but i've digressed.

~ diversity. the states is BIG. there's a lot of space. and it means that everyone, no matter how wacky their idea, probably can have a little plot of land or a building or a place where they can have a chance to try it out. the mormons have utah. homosexuals and hippies have san francisco. wackos have LA. hutterites have their colonies in south dakota. amish in iowa (and moving into south dakota). there are organic farmers and big-scale farmers. there are snotty, organic grocery stores and there are everyday normal ones. there really is something for everyone. and people come in all colors, shapes and sizes. and it seems there's room for that.

whenever i come back home to denmark after being in the states, i'm struck by how much the same everyone is. the clothing choices, the food choices, the cars, the haircuts, the shoes. it's like there's a danish uniform (and sub-uniforms within categories - nurses, schoolteachers, business people, etc.). of course, it's a bit similar to that in south dakota, where i grew up, but it feels like there's more space (and there literally is) to unfold yourself and be a little different.

so there you have it. and i even went a little deeper than i did with the more negative list. and got past that spot of writer's block.

and i do so love those american clouds.

aggressive christianity

being in the states for a few weeks, i was struck by the visible increase in christian fundamentalism all around in the upper midwest. there have always been a few anti-choice signs here and there, and my hometown of 1300 has 12 churches, but there are more and more aggressive bible verses lining the highways and byways and christianity just seems to be much more in your face.

but i found this nail-studded cross west of the town where i grew up most disturbing. apparently, with 12 churches in a town of 1300, the youth groups have banded together into one and they erected this cross on the edge of a cornfield west of town. the large, rusty nails represent the sins of the young people in town.

and it strikes me as extremely violent and aggressive. and i wonder how a bunch of kids in small town south dakota can possibly have so many sins. what on earth are they? sex? drinking? playing hooky from school, the odd joint? hello, these are normal teenage issues - not giant nails on a cross. and to display them in such a harsh way, what good can that possibly do?

i'm more than a little worried about the aggressive tone christianity has taken on in the US in the years of my chosen exile. it seems to me not all that different from the sort of fundamentalist leaning of which all of islam is accused because a few choose to be extreme. when extremism comes to a small town in south dakota, what do we have left?

for more on this, read what frank bruni says about michele bachman and her ilk of the religious right here.

olives may contain pits

when i realized this afternoon that there was a delay in the broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the london olympics, it royally pissed me off. it strikes me as yet another symptom of a society far too focused on the wrong things. a late afternoon live broadcast didn't fit with the needs of the network to capture those advertising dollars, so they delayed it by several hours and completely destroyed the continuity by breaking for ads every 5 minutes. and the play-by-play by the anchors - simplistic, insufficiently-researched and well, moronic. and of course, the first 5 minutes had to be spent speculating as to possible terrorism. shameful.

what has happened to this country?  signs in the grocery store, warning that olives have pits. do people really not know this? are we so far from where our food comes from? i do realize that it's also lawsuit avoidance, but shouldn't we also be worried that it's come to that?

i've been here a week and a half and i'm dumbfounded. i can't stand to watch a news broadcast - they're over-dramatic and under-informed and carry little or no news. the speculations as to the motives of the madman killer in colorado have oddly become "the truth" about him, tho' he hasn't said a word. ordinary people quote glen beck and bill o'reilly and fox "news" as if they tell the truth about everything from school testing to gun control and health care. there's no critical thinking in evidence, apparently no one reasons for themselves (at least not out loud) and worst of all, there's no outrage over this.

where is the outrage?

well, i'm outraged, but at least i get to leave again. and leave again i will. tho' i will express my outrage with my vote in november. it's the least i can do.