mental tricks and mind games

i had to take a logic assessment this morning. it was timed and i knew i had to be in the right frame of mind for it. the results are important to a potential job i'd like to have. i'm good at this sort of test - the kind of questions where you're presented with a series of figures and asked to choose the next one in the sequence or where you're asked to display your knowledge of shades of meaning by choosing opposites from a list of abstract words. so, fortified with a cup of tea and sitting up straight in my chair, hair pulled back neatly, i donned a pair of pretty high heels and took the test. yes, you read that correctly. and yes, i believe it helped me. my inner feminist would like to say such measures aren't necessary, but i believe they are. dressing the part - smart, businesslike, put together - is important to setting the right frame of mind, getting in the zone. and if it takes a pair of heels? so be it.

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speaking of mind games, what's going on in greece, with their resounding rejection of EU terms for restructuring their debt and this morning's resignation of finance minister yanis varoufakis is a fascinating game of cat and mouse. or perhaps it's more like the roadrunner and wile e. coyote - with the anvil crashing down on merkel's head as greece races free and looks back with a grin. maybe it's just that i tend to admire the underdog, but i can't help but think greece was right to push back. 

nearly two decades ago i spent a lot of time in greece as the euro prepared to launch. even then, on the streets of thessaloniki, it was an open secret that they had fudged their numbers to make the cut. everyone knew, including and especially the powers that be in the european union, but they let them join anyway. what's happening today is just the natural progression of those early decisions, for which germany and the greater EU bear as much responsibility as greece does. it will be interesting to see how the mind games unfold, tho' if the bullied resignation of the truth-telling varoufakis is any indication, it's going to get ugly before it's over. he was the only one of the whole lot of them who actually had an education in economics.  for more, go read krugman's analysis. i also liked this piece about him in the guardian.

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have you seen my latest post on #stuckinplastic?

it seems like every time i write for them, i take a trip down memory lane.

sparks are flying

it's going to be a great week. i can feel it. there's just something in the air. happy monday, one and all.

in the zone

iPhone photo by husband

i wrote a long time ago about a place i call the zone. it's been far too long since i felt i was there (two evenings earlier this month, one last month, but that's not enough), but today...don't even get me started. i was so in the zone. it's a kind of feeling of elation and energy and just firing on all cylinders. it undoubtedly has something to do with having tickets to manila in hand. but it's also the right combination of people and energy coming together in a room and forming a kind of natural, human tornado, which feels like it's centered on me (tho' i will grant that perhaps it's not).

it's a bit like i imagine cocaine to make you feel, only without the expense and danger.

i do wish i had control of it and knew how to make it happen.

if you know what i mean, do tell me how you think it works....

the zone

in my this girl post a couple of weeks ago, i mentioned the zone. it's the feeling that i get when everything is clicking, my energy is high, i'm wearing the right clothes, having a good hair day and i can actually SEE people around me being caught up in the sheer force of it. but as i said in that post, i have no control of it. i can tell when it's there, but i can't make it come. i wish i could, because i'm extremely convincing and i always get my way when i'm in the zone. that and actually seeing people be swept up in it are the best parts about it.

certain places are more sure to make it come than others. one of them was associated with my old place of work and one is actually where i work now. so it might have to do with good scandinavian architecture. but i also had moments of being in the zone long before i ever even imagined visiting scandinavia, so it's not only that. i was once totally in the zone on a train speeding through the macedonian countryside on a warm summer night. i have no idea what brought it on, but the train conductor (who was thankfully harmless) found it very compelling and kept lurking outside the coupé.

husband says at those moments that i'm "beaming life," and it was what attracted him to me, lo so many years ago when he was someone else's husband and frankly, i was someone else's wife (but i digress). but i think that what it comes down to is a sense of energy that can almost be seen.

i'm not actually sure how much it has to do with the people around me, but it would make sense that it has something to do with them. i don't know if it's so much that they make me enter the zone or that they prolong it once i'm there. i probably shouldn't actually overanalyze it too much, but you know me, i have to try to pick things apart and understand them.

mostly because i'd like to be able to control it. i'd like to be able to wake up and say, "i'm so gonna be in the zone today!"  but that's simply not how it works.

so i try to enjoy it when it happens. i watch the reactions of people who are hit by it full force. they sometimes have a slightly awed look, or they look like they've just had the wind knocked out of them. some of them try to play it cool and act as if they're in the zone themselves. but it's disarming. it might be why sometimes people tell me all kinds of things, things they wouldn't normally say. or they try to prolong the conversation, hoping that the energy will stay there so they can soak some of it in. or they just hover nearby, not entirely daring to say anything.

but when i'm in the zone, there's plenty of energy for all, so it's not like they're stealing it from me. it's kind of like those old doritos commercials where they said, "eat all you want, we'll make more," the energy is like that. the more people take it to themselves, the more there is. like an endless bright glow of energy. i found myself wanting to assign a color to it, but my mild sinaesthesia tells me that it's different colors all the time, depending on the situation, it's not just one color.

i suppose you can tell that i had one of those days today. i had so many ideas and i felt so excited about what i was doing and discovering (perhaps it's that that puts me in the zone in the first place). the very somber, but sweet man who sits across from me, calculating energy curves and the wave effects on paint coating and how much CO2 it saves if you sail at a certain speed, was knocked quite visibly off-balance, but you could see that it was in a good way. and that he didn't want it to stop. and neither did i.

do any of you know what i mean? and how would you describe that feeling? the zone is just the words i've assigned to it. i've also heard it described as being in flow. what do you call it when you feel it, because i think we all feel it on occasion.

oh well, i'll stop obsessing now and just be grateful for it when it comes.

fun pages

i made these two pages this weekend, using some of the fab new supplies i got from scrapbook express on friday! the top one is still some of the amy butler papers i was able to buy here in denmark. but, the bottom one is love, elsie letters, 7 gypsies papers, and shiny chipboard buttons. i am totally in love with these colors.

it was fun to think of all of the good things that happened in 2007. i had a much longer list and managed to narrow it to this top 7. but, it seemed like a healthy exercise to look back on all of the great things. i think i probably have to make another page--sort of a take 2--as many very good things were left off this one, like:

1. time spent at buresø
2. cape town in november
3. gorgeous beads i bought in cape town in november
4. hugo boss suit
5. the silver ring i got from husband for christmas
6. my chunky pilgrim drama necklace
7. leaving maersk
8. being headhunted
9. the great people i worked with (irene, jacqui, richard, claus, merel, alison, kerttu, monica (x2), michael, møller, jens, all of the guys and girls from headstrong, jari, tomas, erling, henk, søren, i could go on and on...)
10. our super-charged eLearning workshops

it feels really good to look back on all of the good things and it's something that one should do on a regular basis...to be conscious about what's great in life and what's making you tick, instead of focusing on the negatives.

life really is good! especially when i'm feeling in the creative zone.

breakthrough!

i did it! today at my painting lesson, i painted!!! i covered a canvas in paint. it's the one i began at the first lesson...modeled loosely on the kandinsky, a sort of a fish-like creature. i surrounded it with shades of turquoise water today. i also gave it some purple-tones and got rid of some yellow that wasn't working. i felt a faint glimmer of the feeling real painters must have, when the whole canvas is moving with the linseed oil and the pigments. i was almost, but not quite in the zone. but i could SEE the zone from where i stood, even if i didn't quite get there. and it felt like a real breakthrough.