a to å challenge: c is for competition

today we went to one of the many gymnastics exhibitions the child's boarding school is participating in. as we watched the schools and clubs that came before flemming, it struck me that this aspect of danish culture is really interesting. i'd always been puzzled by it because of the lack of competition in it. the exhibitions are just that...exhibitions, performances of elaborate routines which took days and weeks and months to learn, but there is no winner at the end of the day. no scores, no medals. and for me, as an american, that's always been strange - how do you know you did well if you don't find out who wins?

but today, it struck me that what these kids are learning is much deeper than just a dance routine and a few flips. they're learning to perform both as individuals and as part of a larger team. they are each learning their part and doing it to the best of their ability, but it's only as a larger whole that it all comes together. when 200 kids are standing on the floor, doing the same routine and doing it well, it has a power and an impact that's much larger than a single individual doing the same routine alone. and these kids leave the floor, elated with the energy of a performance well done, so there's no need to know who wins to know you did well.  i suspect there's a lesson in that. i also suspect it's a lesson that will serve them well as they grow up and enter the workplace.

fragment from 2013

janteloven (the law of jante) is what you might call the general danish philosophy to live by. and apparently it turns 80 years old this year. it comes from a book written by danish-norwegian author aksel sandemose, who, despite being born and dying in denmark, moved to norway for long enough to be deemed norwegian instead of danish. apparently after a stay in denmark he noticed that the following ten "laws" appear to be the general philosophy.

1. you shouldn't think you are anything (du skal ikke tro, du er noget.)
2. you shouldn't think that you're as much as we are. (du skal ikke tro, at du er lige så meget som os.)
3. you shouldn't believe that you're smarter than we are. (du skal ikke tro, at du er klogere end os.)
4. you shouldn't kid yourself that you're better than us. (du skal ikke bilde dig ind, at du er bedre end os.)
5. you shouldn't believe you know more than us. (du skal ikke tro, at du ved mere end os.)
6. you shouldn't believe that you are more than us. (du skal ikke tro, at du er mere end os.)
7. you shouldn't believe you're good for anything. (du skal ikke tro, at du dur til noget.)
8. you shouldn't laugh at us. (du skal ikke le ad os.)
9. you shouldn't believe that anyone likes you. (du skal ikke tro, at nogen bryder sig om dig.)
10. you shouldn't think you can teach us anything. (du skal ikke tro, at du kan lære os noget.)

-----

a fragment begun 11/5.2013 and never published. unfinished thoughts. growing dusty among my drafts.

books as yet unwritten

a couple of books on denmark by expats (i know, we're not supposed to use that word anymore, thanks to its colonial, possibly racist overtones) have come out recently -  a year of living danishly and the danish way of parenting . both are getting quite a lot of press. and it makes me regret that i've not written more than a string of blog posts in my feeble attempts to understand the danes. however, i think there are still other books to be written. in fact, right now, as we speak, i'm plotting one on the danes' uncanny and impressive ability to drink exactly the right amount to maintain the perfect buzz for 12 hours straight (it's how they get through christmas). i can surely do much better than you suck at drinking, tho' you have to admire a book that advises exactly how much to drink at a children's party...

taking the time

we've had an unseasonably cool spring. but at last the beech leaves have sprung forth. there is no color of green quite like it. i pulled over today on my way home and took a little walk in the woods, to soak it all in. some days, when you're feeling down and everything seems like too much and you have a dull headache, you need to do that. to indulge in the moment. to take the time. to breathe. to soak it all in. to let go of it all and just be.

while i was making dinner, i watched the first two parts of a documentary on loneliness that DR has made. the last episode will be broadcast this evening and i saw an ad for it yesterday and realized that a person who i know is one of the lonely people. well, i actually, i don't know her, i've just seen her around. when i got involved in my community culture house, she was there at that first meeting as well and wanted to be involved. but somehow, she didn't make it onto the board. i've seen her since a few times, also in connection with the culture house - she bought some cool chairs when we had the big sale before we emptied the building, so i know that we'd have that in common. but still, tho' i chatted with her about the chairs, we didn't really take it any further or become friends. and now there she is, on a program where she is standing forward and admitting that she's lonely. that some days the only people she talks to are at the grocery store. and it fills me with sadness. everyone wants to make a human connection, but somehow, we are so full of ourselves and our own lives that we don't do it. especially here in denmark, where there are few of the casual conversations you can fall into if you're waiting for a bus or in the checkout line if you're in the US. and that lack of interaction has consequences. like a woman being so lonely that she's willing to go on television and say so. right here in the happiest place on earth. (that last sentence is in the sarcasm font.)

and it feels a bit like all of the walks in a beautiful, bright green spring forest won't make it better. we need to do more. we need to really see one another. acknowledge one another. interact. be more open. talk to each other. say hello to our neighbors. drink a cup of coffee. chat. take the time.

pondering happiness

loving inna's post about happiness...and pondering it myself. how connected is happiness to contentment? to gratitude? to satisfaction? to feeling safe? to sunshine? to being well rested? to things? of course, i'm pondering this in relation to our happiness project and those eternally happy danes, but also just in terms of my own personal state of being. and i'm wondering if i'm happy? i think in moments that i am, but that those moments feel fleeting and elusive. how can we better hold onto them? and disconnect them from material things? i don't really know the answers. but maybe this will help...i signed up for 100 days of happiness starting march 1.  i don't know if it will help, but it should at least give me renewed motivation for my daily photos.

* * *

by the way, something that makes me very happy that i had not yet shared, is this little project which i had the pleasure of working on at the end of last year: 

a day in the life of the world's happiest people starts at home

a few of us from the drink & draw group got to talking about this whole notion of denmark as home of the world's happiest people. i still maintain that if the danes are so happy, you definitely can't see it on them. even my fellow drink & draw-ers are a bit provoked by the whole notion and they are danish! so, we are putting together a project where we are going to ask a wide variety of people of all ages, backgrounds and from all over the country, to keep a diary for a day (all of them on the same day). we will collect the diary entries and see if they shed some light on what it is that makes the danes so darn happy. we don't want it to be a scientific, clinical look, we want it to be personal and intimate. our intention is that then we will invite a variety of artists - painters, actors, storytellers, filmmakers, playwrights, sculptors, whatever - to gather and give creative expression to the diaries. in my head, there's definitely a podcast in it, undoubtedly with multiple episodes. i think that also in my head is something along the lines of the wonderful and profound humans of new york - with short, poignant stories that tell so much about the culture at large. but i'm also trying to reserve judgement and remain open, because once we have the diaries in hand, they may point us in another direction entirely and i want to be able to move in that direction.

yesterday, we all tried the task on for size ourselves. we figured we should feel it under our own skin if we were going to ask people to do it. we agreed that we would write it all out - good and bad and try not to hide anything. we have shared our diaries with one another and will get together next friday and talk about the next steps in our project.

i wrote my day on my marquee blog (see sidebar if you're interested), but i also did some much-needed art journaling to go along with it.  i think i needed both the linear timeline side of things and something more abstract and creative. and i can definitely tell that i needed those moments of creativity and the different sort of concentration that accompanies them. in fact, i've continued them today and they helped me settle down and get back to work again. they quieted some of yesterday's restlessness. i also thought it was quite wonderful that i came across the quote in the one on the bottom while paging through an old magazine, looking for collage materials. it's a bit uncanny how you often come across the thing you most need to hear at precisely the moment you need it.

i realize once again, working on this, that i'm happiest when i'm setting an idea out in the world and seeing what becomes of it. i can't wait to see where this will take us, but i'm also definitely enjoying the place it's helped me occupy right here and now. and to be bringing this to life with a group of awesome and creative women is pretty magical as well.

telling stories, weaving meaning and figuring out why the danes are so darn happy

my computer has been acting up for more than a week now, which is why i've been so absent again. this weekend, i gave it a thorough vacuuming, upgraded my smc fan control and it seems to be behaving like its old self again. i made sure it's backing up, as i do fear it's on its last legs. it's been a good iMac and it has served me very well. i hope to get some more time out of it, but i guess we'll see. computers aren't made to last forever, after all and those shiny new iMacs look pretty cool.

i'm down with my first flu of the season. i've got a headache that won't quit, a low grade fever and aches in all of my muscles. it really rather fits with the grey, dreary weather we've been having and if one must be sick, it may as well be in these dark, rainy days. there's no better time to curl up in bed with a book and a cat or to listen to the serial podcast again from the beginning. (seriously, if you're not listening to serial, you're really missing out, there's even a reddit where people are discussing it endlessly obsessively.)

serial feels to me like it's somehow reviving storytelling or retrieving it from the trite hollywood ending kind of storytelling that we've become so accustomed to. and i know that serial isn't the only place where a great story is being told slowly...there are spoken word festivals and other great story events/podcasts (like the moth), but it's such a sensation that it feels like it's moving us in a good new direction with stories. something sort of akin to the slow food movement, slowing down and enjoying the process, whether it's of a story or a dish.

apropos stories, at drink & draw on saturday evening, we got to talking about that whole thing with the danes being the happiest people on earth. and we talked about ways of drawing out people's happiness stories, since we did agree that all that happiness isn't necessarily visible to the naked eye. and i think that maybe investigating the happiness and talking to a whole lot of people, in a kind of a slow storytelling way ala serial just might be the ticket.  slowly gathering all of those individual happinesses of different colors and gathering (weaving?) them in a whole carpet of happiness (i had to make that photo go with this post in the end) sounds like a pretty good idea for a project, doesn't it?

what is danishness?

today's (yesterday's?) jyllands posten (you may remember them from a certain set of mohammed cartoons) had an article about a study suggesting that danes think the biggest problem with foreigners is that they don't understand and embrace danish values. i wouldn't have known about the article, not being a reader of jyllands posten, but i was contacted by my radio crush to be part of a radio program about the article this evening.

so i dashed into 7-11 and bought their last copy of the paper, which oddly, they had hidden in a back room, and i prepared for the program. what struck me about the article was that it was unclear what these danish values that we foreigners apparently reject are. that was completely unstated in the survey where people had come up with that answer and it wasn't until halfway through the second article about it, on page 6, that a list of values even was mentioned. they included things like democracy, equality, valuing work and the vague "personal freedom." those strike me as pretty universal and not exactly uniquely danish. western, perhaps or even protestant, but difficult to narrow down to a particular nationality.

after talking with the journalist, i decided to think about danishness instead and see if some values fell out of that. what are the things that strike me as so danish after all these years? a lot of workplace behaviors came to mind - like the fact that it's ok to have a conversation with the boss and to even grill him (and i do mean him, since that whole equality thing isn't as pervasive as they might like it to seem) a little bit during that conversation, regardless of your position in the firm. i've not really seen that outside of denmark. leaving at 3 p.m. to pick up your kids and having no one look askance at you. wearing a kind of monochrome (read: black) uniform for most of the year, outside of a few wild weeks of summer, where everyone breaks out the summer wardrobe they purchased back in the late 80s and which never wore out, due to the limited use it's had, and embraces a kind of retro madness during the warm weather. and then there's the full calendars which quash all hope of spontaneity because you need to book someone for a dinner party at least two months ahead, even tho' you have no idea if you'll be in the mood to have people over for dinner two months from now.  and then there's the design thing - it's important to have the right lamps (PH) and chairs (Arne Jacobsen) and couch (Borge Mortensen) and table (Piet Hein) (see, i even had so much respect i capitalized their names). of course, that design thing creates a uniformity in homes, that while it's in good taste, ends up quite sterile, impersonal and, dare i say it...boring. (yes, i dared to say it, tho' i myself have Hans Wegner and Kaare Klint chairs and some Tom Rossou lamps, plus the fabulous Triplex lamp). (i wonder if that means i'm integrated?)

and this sameness in design principles and clothing got me thinking about that supposed value of "personal freedom." if there were really personal freedom, we'd have the space in which to choose other chairs and lamps and you'd see more variety in the clothing shops (there's a great deal of black, i can tell you). so i wonder how much personal freedom there actually is. there is, of course, personal freedom in terms of one's right to be gay or to have an abortion and those are important things, but again, they are true many places and aren't uniquely danish.

so i'm still wondering what these danish values are that we foreigners are so reluctant to adopt...and why it's such a source of worry for the danes. perhaps if they got better at communicating and outwardly sharing their real, core values (and not just a bunch of stuff that could be from a UN pamphlet), we'd have an easier time adapting to them.

a couple of little rants about the rubbish service culture in denmark

christmas is over and we're in the liminal space, waiting for the year to end and the new one to begin. i went to bed with wet hair and woke up with what my mother would call a fright wig. and somehow, it's all making me feel rather ranty.

rant #1: post danmark

in the week before christmas, i received a ransom letter from post danmark, saying they were holding a christmas package hostage until i (as receiver of a package i had not yet seen) sent more information about the contents. they assigned the package a number and said it contained, "støvler, tæj, mm" from the USA and that it weighed 4 kilos. they did not say who sent it, nor was i able, even after asking google translate for help, to figure out what "tæj" was. so, i guessed that it was the christmas parcel from my sister and that they boots were the doc martens she got sabin for her present. so, i asked her for the receipt and sent it dutifully (pun intended) to post danmark.

i heard nothing. and more nothing. for a week.

so today i called and asked how it was going. they claimed to have sent me a letter (probably via post danmark, so its chances of reaching me are slim) saying i hadn't provided documentation for the other items - the mystery "tæj" and the equally mysterious "mm," which is the danish equivalent of "etc." since i am the receiver of the package, i have not yet seen the items which are in it, therefore, it's hard for me to document them unless you specify what the hell they are. why isn't this just common sense for post danmark?

the nice lady on the phone today could see that this was a problem. so she took my number and they are supposed to get back to me today. meanwhile, their own limit of 14 days is quickly passing and even tho' i've been in touch (twice now, once in writing and once on the phone), they will likely send the package back to my sister before it's all finished. and then she can resend it and we can start all over again.

oh, the joys of customer service in denmark.

rant #2: bus #214, licence plate TD 92845, tide bus company, driving for sydtrafik in denmark

a few days before school was out, it was a dark and foggy morning. i was right behind the bus as i dropped sabin off at school. he was in quite a hurry and gunned it away down the little side street by the school. there were two small boys on their bicycles, wobbily making their way out to the big street, where they waited to cross. the bus was right beside them and wanted to turn right. there was quite a lot of traffic and, i may have mentioned, it was very foggy and still very dark. so the boys were cautiously waiting to be sure they could cross the road with their bicycles. well, mr. important bus driver decided to help them in their decision to cross the road by beginning to honk his big, giant bus horn at them. they were wobbly and unsure anyway and the honk nearly scared them off their bikes. it did, however, also scare them into action, and he saved the 30 extra seconds it would have taken to wait for them to cross on their initiative, but decided to try to make it up for it by gunning it and roaring off down the street.

i was so taken aback, that i noted the license number of the bus and came home and wrote to tide, the company running those buses, asking them to tell their driver to be a little kinder to children in traffic near a school. they wrote back telling me that since i wasn't involved, they were going to ignore my message.

yup. danish service culture at its best.

rant #3: the hunt for the christmas turkey

danes eat pork roast and duck for christmas. turkey is unusual, but not impossible to source. most grocery stores have a frozen bird in their freezer case. ten days before christmas, i checked my local store and found their frozen turkeys were the size of large chickens (4200 grams was the largest - that's about 8 pounds). so i went over to the butcher counter and asked if they could get me a larger bird. the guy dismissed me with a snort, rolling his eyes at me, saying if i wanted a turkey, i should have ordered it 3 months ago. very helpful and service-minded. (that was the sarcasm font, by the way.) and way to go, super brugsen in give (i've got more examples of your lack of service mindedness, but i'll save them for another post).

so i began checking all of the other grocery stores and butchers in my area, driving to several other towns in the process. all to no avail, there were no turkeys of reasonable size available, frozen or fresh. then a friend sent me a link to a butcher in vejle (why didn't i think of that), which claimed to have a turkey that would serve 10 people left. i called them and asked if it was true. they said they had one bird left and mentioned to me that it was already stuffed with a mixture of minced pork and cream, but it was a fresh turkey, not horrendously expensive (at 440 kroner/$80) and i was desperate, so i ordered it.

and on christmas, i took it out and put it in the pan, thinking it looked a little strange, but i chalked that up to the pork stuffing and put it in the oven. while it was cooking, it smelled much more like pork than turkey, but i could live with that. then, the weirdest thing happened. i asked my sister-in-law, who is a trained butcher, to do the honors and carve it. and she discovered that except for legs and wings, it had been completely deboned! a boneless turkey for christmas. i find it a little funny that the butcher didn't think to mention that little fact to me. and how can i make soup now with no turkey carcass?

that said, it was delicious and moist. i had been a little worried that since it was stuffed, i couldn't brine it and make it tender, but the pork did the trick as well. and that pork stuffing was also delicious. and without the bones, it was much easier to slice, but i still find it rather weird and won't be repeating it.

and now, i feel amazingly better, having gotten that out of my system. thank you for reading!

mediocrity with a dose of rudeness thrown in or just another friday in denmark

i know i've said it before, but it can be challenging dealing with the rudeness of danes in public spaces. they may be the world's happiest people, but you sure can't see it on them and they are, to all appearances, not even remotely interested in making sure those around them are happy too. especially on a friday afternoon. they all go into what i like to think of as their solipsism bubble and they close out any and all evidence that other humans, especially those they don't know, exist. i ran into several instances of it just today. but i shouldn't be surprised, because it is friday.

first encounter - i was pulling into a parking spot at the mall (i was there to pick up sabin's repaired new iPhone 4S, which was in for repairs) and there was someone pulling into the spot directly in front of me, so we were coming towards each other. and she just kept coming, to pull through into MY spot so that she was facing outwards. she was so aggressive about it, that although i was halfway in and had a perfect right to the spot, i actually backed up and let her do it. she didn't even wave or smile at me. and she wouldn't look me in the eye when i tried to give her a sarcastic thumbs up. she refused steadfastly to acknowledge my existence. it was all about her. happily, i was in a good place, so i shrugged it off and didn't let it ruin my day. i'm not always able to do that. it helped that she resembled a cow clad in a ratty-looking sheepskin vest.

second encounter - in a parking lot (the friday solipsism bubble is especially prevalent in parking lots) beside the bank. i had parked my car and was walking towards the bank when i had to suddenly stop because a car came roaring in from the road and, inches from my toes and nose, whipped into a parking spot that was to my left. as if i wasn't there. which, in the eyes of the woman driving, i wasn't, since we hadn't met one another before. because when you're in the danish solipsism bubble, people you didn't go to kindergarten with very conveniently don't exist.

this is the jerk from the third encounter, license plate and all.
i wish i'd had the foresight to photograph the jerk from the first one.

third encounter - in front of the child's school, there is parking, as you might imagine. you normally pull in nose first, front bumper of the car up to the curb. but there was a parent in a station wagon, at the "rush hour" for afternoon pickup, parallel parked there, across three spots and effectively blocking 5 in total, because it wasn't possible to park in front or behind. she was chatting away on the telephone, blissfully oblivious to the other parents who also needed to park. as if she were the only one in the world. solipsism. egotistical self-absorption.

but even before these parking lot encounters, i was feeling grumpy towards danish culture. in the form of two emails from the leadership of our local school.

in the first, the principal at the school took 374 words (i know this because i copy/pasted the email into pages so i could see a word count) to vaguely inform about something vague, at a long distance, through a fog. and i still have no idea what she was talking about, as it was filled with jargon, smoke and mirrors. reading the email was like stumbling into a theatre halfway through the movie and trying to figure out the plot. and i couldn't. and it was not because my danish is bad. it was because it utterly lacked communication skills. makes me wonder what they're teaching my child about writing and clear communication.

in the second, the superintendent (the who did such a good job (insert sarcasm font* here) of handling the whole bullying topic in recent weeks), sent us a mail with a new alcohol policy. i can appreciate that the school wants an alcohol policy, but the mail opened with the words, "Med udgangspunkt i at vi som skole altid skal tage udgangspunkt i den svageste part..." which translates as, "with a basis in the fact that we as a school must always have a basis in the weakest link..." because yes, that's what you want to hear from your school, that they cater to the lowest common denominator and see it as their mission. and even better when it's inelegantly written. again, are they passing these writing "skills" on to our children? *weep*

i am feeling a little tired of mediocrity handed my way with a dose of rudeness. some days it's easier to handle than others. today wasn't one of those days.


* which one is the sarcasm font, by the way?

some days are like that

it's been one of those days. you know the kind...where you're running around, doing a million errands and tho' it seems like there must be a rainbow there on the horizon, you simply can't focus on it properly. all the further ahead you can see is the next item on the list. pumpkins: check. cat food: check. return library books: check. green market which is the only place they have sweetened condensed milk: check. smashed screen iPhone to repair: check. 

although technically speaking, and in terms of the list of things that must be done for our saturday halloween party, i got a lot done, it felt like spinning my wheels. why is it we can't appreciate the little things? especially when collectively, they do add up to quite a lot. 

i also got a bee in my bonnet for my next knitted blanket (because i want to make another one) and was stymied in my attempts to buy yarn by three yarn shops. one, where they didn't have the colors i had in mind. and the other, because it wasn't there anymore and i didn't have time to go look for where it had moved. and a third one i didn't stop in because there was no parking nearby. i'm sure they would have had precisely what i was looking for. *sigh*

* * *

i spent the evening helping with a political event. there are municipal elections coming up in a few weeks and the women candidates for the city council (which is more like a county commission in american terms) were doing a speed dating evening and i agreed to help. my help extended to pouring glasses of white wine. i'm pretty good at that. it was also interesting for me to talk to the candidates. not very many people came, so i got plenty of chance to do that. i felt both educated and dismayed. this multi-party system they have in denmark (there were candidates from 6 different parties there and all but one of them had all of their own teeth) is quite fascinating. each party does manage to have its own personality and i would say the candidates that were there fit the profile (tho' the missing tooth was a little counter-intuitive), even tho' at the municipal level politics is something completely other than what it is at the national level. only a couple of the candidates that were there were already on the city council, so it was interesting to hear why the new folks wanted to get involved. and i probably did legitimately get closer to knowing who i want to vote for in a few weeks. because yes, as a foreigner, i can vote. i am a permanent resident and can vote in municipal and regional elections, but not national. danes are democratic like that. it's part of why they're so happy.

* * *

this series of photos of an old japanese lady and her cat are magical. 

we might have to name our new white cat fukumaru.

* * *

it only took about 8 hours before the first bossy, righteous dane reared her ugly head in the pinterest translators group. *sigh* i guess it was bound to happen.

but mostly, it's really interesting following the threads in the group (which is secret, sorry, i can't share), 

also for finnish. some serious language intricacies are being discussed in a very interesting way.

* * *

i might have to drag out the old canon AE-1 and try some freelensing to shake things up photographically. problem is, i'm rubbish at getting the films developed, so who knows when we'll see the results.

bullying: nothing will change if you can't discuss it

i've got bullying on the brain. a week or so ago, several parents in our community called a town meeting to raise awareness of bullying in our community. i saw a sign about it at the library, but it was the same day that i spent at the food co-creation event and i only got back to town as it was starting and i still hadn't fed my family yet at that point, so i didn't go, even tho' i was curious about it. earlier in the year, i worked on english subtitles for a danish program about bullying that was broadcast on DR1. while my own child doesn't have problems with it (either as bully or bullied, thank goodness) at school, i know it's a big issue in schools and frankly, in the workplace and other places among adults.

it turned out that very few people attended the meeting that evening. and the reason is a disturbing one. apparently teachers at the 0-6 school had taken down the signs about the meeting and spread the word that it had been canceled. and quite a lot of parents must have believed it, as only a handful came to a meeting where they were expecting to have more people there than were allowed by the fire code (that would have been 150+). why would teachers not want this important topic to be discussed, i wondered?

the issue moved to the pages of the local newspaper in the days that followed. the first article reported on the meeting - three parents of children who were bullied told their sad and harsh stories. the reporter expressed that it was too bad no one from the bully's side had shown up and that there was no debate on the topic, as had been planned, since it was only the bullied side that was present.

but that must have not been quite correct, as the next day, there was an interview with the principal of the 7-9th grade school, where she said she had attended the meeting and thought it was a shame that she was never given the chance to speak. the first article had indicated that there was no one else present who wanted to speak, so i wonder if she didn't even try to speak up that evening.

she confirmed that the posters had been taken down by teachers at the other school, but said that they would have to speak for their own actions, she wouldn't do so for them. she also indicated that the school acts immediately in cases of bullying, talking to both the children involved and their parents immediately. she gave a recent example of a student who had used a fellow student's gym bag as a toilet and was going to be replacing his bag. she did admit that teachers and school leadership could only do something about incidents which they knew about and that undoubtedly other things happened at school that were never reported and thus not acted upon. fair enough that the teachers cannot be everywhere at all times.

things were quiet for a couple of days and then the story of the worst bullying incident came out in the newspaper. the story had been told at the meeting that evening, but too few had heard it. it was a case of systematic bullying over two years, which resulted in the boy in question growing increasingly angry and violent himself and eventually he, as the bullied, was kicked out of school. he was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the bullying and spent several months away from school. he's now started in a new school, as it was impossible for him to return. a sad tale indeed.

only one side of the tale has been told, as the school claims to be under a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the case. all of the parents received a letter from the superintendent who is responsible for both local schools, on friday (the day after the article appeared). the tone of the letter is very defensive and, in my view, not at all willing to admit that there is an issue. he claims that they have been "hung out" and that not all of the stories are true and that it's quite difficult to have to just "sit back and take it," due to the confidentiality agreement. the letter tries only to shut down the discussion, not open up for an honest conversation that might lead to solutions and new thinking around ways of handling bullying.

then, on monday, a politician got involved and has asked the school for a written explanation of the events in the story of the boy who ended up with PTSD. the explanation will be handled on a political, municipal level by the division of children and young people. it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

i find it sad that it's such a sensitive issue that it seems to be impossible for the school to open up and talk about it. no one wants there to be bullying so bad that a child is chased out of school completely, but to not be able to discuss it is a tragedy. how can anyone learn from the experience and prevent the next one if it's surrounded by defensiveness and a lack of open, honest discussion?

in the program i worked with in the early spring, many of the teachers were also very closed and unwilling to discuss the topic, some of them actually resorted to bullying tactics themselves on the man who was making the program, ignoring him and not letting him join them for lunch when he asked. unless they are involved in the bullying themselves, i can't see why teachers wouldn't want to open up and look for solutions together with parents and the community as a whole?

it's a sad affair all around and i'm grateful that somehow or other it's not an issue that's affected our family or our child's love for school. a week or so ago, she was actually sick and insisted on going because she didn't want to miss out on what they'd be doing in class that week. so the school is doing something (and probably a whole lot of something) right, but they're not handling this bullying issue very well. not very well at all.

send in the clowns

ahh, it's a day and a half until the school group departs for st. petersburg. still no visas and still no flight details, tho' we did, late thursday evening, get a more detailed itinerary as to the actual sights the kids will see. we were told they have to be at the airport at 4:30 a.m. on tuesday, tho' no flight number or time or anything to accompany that enlightening little fact. we were given a link to the air baltic website and a reference number so we could check in online. sadly, since it's a group reservation, i cannot actually access flight numbers, flight path or flight times (e.g. an itinerary) and it's still too early to check her in, so i can't see it that way either. so i wrote back and said that i thought that the flight information was missing on the information we received. 

the clown who sent it responded, "what specifically is missing?" 

i answered, "times, flight numbers, airline, just the usual flight itinerary, like any normal trip." then i further explained that i couldn't see it on the air baltic website, due to it being a group reservation. i said i couldn't imagine there were direct flights between billund and st. petersburg, so there must be at least one flight about which we lacked any information at all.

then, while impatiently waiting for an answer (he had answered quickly the first time, despite it being sunday, so i expected an answer just as quickly), i thought i'd dig out an old flight itinerary and show him what i meant (tho' in this day and age, imagining that someone hasn't seen an airline's flight itinerary is a bit of a stretch). so i sent him an old one from my days of traveling with SAS (they once owned Air Baltic, so i figured the same systems would be in place). and since his tactic is to treat me as if i'm a small, dull child, i carefully explained it all to him:

"When you travel, the travel agency or even just the airline provides a PDF with all of the flight details on it. I have attached an example, in case you're not familiar with these. It contains all of the information needed for the flights - flight number, airline, departure time, terminal, arrival time, how much luggage is allowed. All of this information is included for each of your flights. Everything you need to know about your flights if you (or more importantly, your 12-year-old child) are going on a trip to another country. Depending on the airline, it's even available electronically, so you can use Passport on your iPhone as your ticket/check-in.

I expect to receive such an itinerary tomorrow morning at the latest. Specifically."

he initially responded that he didn't have such a detailed itinerary, but that he would look into it.

then, a little bit later, he sends this:

BT146 Billund - Riga
BT442 Riga - Sct. Petersborg (sic)
BT445 Sct. Petersborg (sic) - Riga
BT145 Riga - Sct. Petersborg (sic - believe this should read Billund)

we're getting closer, but still no flight times or the actual dates of the flights (tho' the dates i more or less know, since a previous 8-mail conversation finally revealed those).

why be so difficult, i wondered and so i remarked "no times/dates? very mysterious."

then he has the nerve to answer that they were included in the previous mail. which they were not. if they were, i wouldn't have been asking in the first place.

and i couldn't help myself, i had to ask:

I sincerely do not understand why getting this perfectly normal, logical information out of you is like pulling teeth. What possible reason would you have to keep essential details like this from us? It was the same way with the changed dates, it took 4-5 emails to get the new dates from you. I don't think I'm asking too much or for anything out of the ordinary. I am a parent who wants to know the details of her 12-year-old daughter's trip.

and funnily enough, it's been nearly and hour and he hasn't answered. and i still don't know the actual flight times of these flights. tho' now, with the flight numbers, i could look it up and probably will. we have exchanged ten mails and i still don't have the information i need and it's not like it's something special i'm asking for, just a simple, normal flight itinerary, which every travel agent or airline provides when you make a booking. i just wonder why it has to be so hard? 

i would have canceled this whole thing long ago, but somehow i want to see how it plays out. and if we cancel, sabin's friend is left alone on the trip without anyone she knows and we didn't want to do that to her. i'm still holding out hope that it won't happen because they won't have the visas by 4:30 a.m. tuesday morning, but only time will tell. 

i'll keep you posted.

update: i finally got a response from the clown, he said, and i quote (translation mine), "i have read your mail and have nothing to add. that's it from here." 

* * *

"Society is telling us, like, be true to yourself, authentic, develop your potential, be kind to others. It’s kind of what I ironically call a slightly enlightened Buddhist hedonism."

--yup, zizek has still got it.

sometimes you have to call a spade a spade

that pipe says "danger zone"

imagine this scenario: you're coming down with a cold and feeling a bit achy and under the weather, so you're making yourself a nice warm cup of elderberry cordial. your phone rings and you answer, stating your name in lieu of hello, as you've been forced into coerced taught by the culture of the country in which you live. the person on the other end doesn't identify himself, but instead sarcastically asks who he has gotten hold of. you repeat your name, mentally kicking yourself for not asking who the hell he was first. then he finally reveals that he's the rhino from the ungdomsskole (remember the one that's supposed to be taking sabin to st. petersburg in 10 days?) and you've filled out the visa application totally incorrectly (despite filling it out exactly as he advised you on the phone last saturday) and you need to turn some password over to him immediately, as he's sitting at the russian embassy in copenhagen. you say that rather than turn over a password (who does that to someone on the phone?), you would gladly log into the application and make the requested changes (tho' he hadn't said what they were yet at that point), since it should probably be you anyway as the child's parent. and despite not having said what the changes should be, but just condescendingly accusing you of filling it out wrongly, he gets very snippy and demands your password again.

you're standing outside, since the reception is rubbish in the house, but you can't for the life of you remember any password on the visa application site. and if you did set a password, it's one you commonly use (you bad) and you don't want to just hand it out to some condescending asshole on the phone. so again, you try to calmly state that you would be glad to log into the russian embassy system and make the changes (provided you are told what they are, since, again, you filled it out per the rhino's instructions while on the phone with him last saturday). since he was at the actual embassy, they would surely be able to access the updated form on their end and use the correct information.

but he goes on in the most condescending tone, as if you are a small, dull child, saying the equivalent of "listen here missy" (høre nu her) that you must immediately turn over the password to him or you can just go to copenhagen yourself next week and secure the visa. and that point, you completely see red, switch to english and end up calling him, and i quote, a fucking asshole, among a rather lot of other things, which may also have included swear words. bearing in mind that danes use the word fuck freely and it doesn't have the same impact to them that it does to you, you mean it with every fiber of your being in that moment and you mean it in the strong american sense of the words, even as you realize you probably shouldn't have gone there. but seriously, this asshole, who has been abominably disorganized and has still, tho' the trip is due to leave in 11 days, not provided an itinerary, flight details or any other information about the trip, has the nerve to be a condescending prat to you on the phone because you filled out a form as he instructed. unbelievable.

as you might guess, all of this happened to me this afternoon. and after i hung up and went inside to make changes to the visa, i learned that there isn't a password - all you needed was the visa application number (which he had on a physically-printed piece of paper) and the first five letters of sabin's last name, which was clearly stated in the blank beside it. there wasn't a password. so he was a complete ass for absolutely no reason.

there is a worrying thread running through all of the encounters i've had thus far with the ungdomsskole. it started already at our parents meeting when the leader of our local outpost told a highly sardonic and condescending (not to mention sexist) story about how sometimes young people's mothers call him to sign their kids up for things that he thought the kids should sign themselves up for. i suppose i'm being put in this box as well, as i am a mother who, funnily enough, is involved in preparing her 12-year-old daughter's visa application for a trip to russia. apparently, these kids should just do these things for themselves. and if, as a mother, i want to know something more about what my child will experience, is that seriously too much to ask? an itinerary, possibly some flight details, for a school trip to russia? isn't that just a given? these disorganized clowns haven't even managed that. on the other hand, it's likely that the trip will fall through, as they've gone to hand in the visa applications far too late. from what i can read on the russian website, it will take at least ten working days, maybe 7 if we're lucky, and there are only 6 working days left before their departure.

i truly hate to find myself becoming one of those sort of righteous danish women, but there you have it. i've been pressed into it by a condescending, misogynist ass of a danish man. and while i will admit i shouldn't have called him a fucking asshole. he really was a fucking asshole.

* * *

and to take our minds off all of this, some interesting photos.

or have you read sinead's open letter to miley cyrus?

are you awake?

i went with a friend to an amazing event called salon allison park at the mungo park theatre in kolding. the fabulous young women who work at the theatre got together and decided that in their busy lives, they were missing conversations that weren't of a professional or practical nature. they were missing comparing notes with other women on things of everyday concern, so they decided to stage an event, largely for women (tho' men were welcome too), to talk about the everyday.  

but let me back up a second. the theatre where the event took place (tho' it wasn't a play) is named for mungo park, who was a scottish explorer of the african continent. allison was his wife, so the girls found it appropriate to name the salon after her. 

i'll admit i had visions of a salon in the french sense - a setting for highly intellectual and philosophical discussions. when we first started, i was feeling a little resentful that because we were a large group of women (and just a handful of brave men), we were reduced to speaking of everyday topics rather than philosophy. my misgivings fell quickly away as we began.

the evening was well-planned. when you came in, you were given a sticker on which to write your name and the answer to a question that was on the back. you weren't allowed to tell anyone what your question was at that point. my question was "what are you good at today?" and i answered "laughing." the question proved to be the method by which we found the first table we should join. we had to go around, reading everyone else's name tags and trying to find those who likely had the same question as ourselves. we were pretty spot on at our table.

then, once we settled in and a bit of bubbly was poured, one of the young women who arranged the evening told a poignant little story of her everyday. she's a freelance theatre director and a graduate student. she lives a chaotic life, without much of a regular schedule. she works long hours and has trouble, like many of us, knowing the difference between work time and time off. with all of our devices and connectivity, we are on all the time. she was expecting her first child and was longing for a life like the one of her childhood, where they lived the same place, picked apples from the same trees and had a regular schedule. she had baked several hundred lovely little homemade tarts with apple and seasonal berries for the evening, as well as tiny delicious meringue kisses and little surprise "lunch packages." it was a beautiful way to share her dream of an everyday.

then it was our turn. there was a little stack of cards on the table, with question prompts about our everyday lives to get us talking. at our table, we were a little hesitant at first, but were soon talking about ex-husbands and lives turned upside down and meaningful jobs and time with children and grandchildren and sick husbands and choices made along the way. we were disappointed when the signal came for the next phase to begin.

the next phase was a quick round, where we were in pairs and each of us had a stack of questions, where we had to answer whether we engaged in an activity out of desire or duty. they were questions like do you say i love you? do you pay taxes? do you celebrate birthdays? do you make dinner? do you laugh at jokes? do you work?

then came the third round, where we came together in a new group, based on a little symbol up in the corner of our name tags. the broad theme of this final round was dreams. there was a stack of ten questions. the first one was are you awake? the second: do you dream? and we started talking about our dreams and our nightmares. and around the time we got to the fifth or sixth question, do you live someone else's dream?, we realized we were discussing the wrong kind of dreams. it was dreams of the hopes and variety. but honestly, i loved the first part of the conversation best, where we talked about the dreams we dream when we're asleep.

there was a great energy in the room. a happy, lively hum of voices. people laughed and were open and seemed delighted to share with strangers. it was decidedly undanish. but it proved that even danes crave interaction with new people and want to share their stories and hear other people's stories. it was very danish that it was all very formalized and it required a whole lot of question prompts to get people started. but once they started, whoa! it really was like a floodgate of bottled up sharing was opened. 

if we could get everyone talking about everyday things in line at the grocery store or on the train as well, denmark would be transformed and we might even start to be able to see on people's faces why they come out on top of those happy lists year after year. 

* * *

the most beautiful thing you'll see all day. and maybe even all week. possibly even all year.

it's that beautiful.

of handsome men and not so handsome politicians

as you know, i spend a rather inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what makes the danes tick. i have assorted bloggy (and real life) friends who do as well. here's an especially amusing new theory - the theory of the handsome danish men. yesterday, i observed a Handsome Danish Man in action (he was Handsome, just ask him, he'll tell you himself (flips hair fetchingly)). he sauntered around importantly. he flashed smiles at himself when he caught sight of his salt and pepper hair in mirror-like surfaces. he oddly kept calling attention to the fact that he is an embedsmand (non-political government official), which frankly, detracted significantly from his handsomeness, but must have been making him feel important. and it was more than obvious that he feels important as well as Handsome. however, i'm not yet ready to fully buy the theory as in my opinion, it's danish women who exhibit the most appallingly rude behavior in public space. perhaps they're just bitter about being treated badly all those years by the handsome men. i'll have to ponder this new theory a bit more.

* * *

apropos attempting to understand the danes, there was recent swirl in the billund newspapers surrounding a report on quality of life among expats in that municipality. (billund is where the second largest airport in denmark is located and is the home of lego.) apparently one local politician was so incensed that the report was in english that he publicly declared that it was over with addressing politicians in english in the municipality. 

the report is the result of interviews and a workshop with 22 expats living within the municipality (which is more like a county-sized entity in US terms). they had a lot of positive things to say about denmark (it's safe, it's not corrupt, it's a great place to raise children, there is a good work-life balance), but they also expressed a lot of negatives, largely surrounding how hard it is to break down the barriers and establish a social life with danes. people had tears in their eyes as they told tales of feeling rejected by their neighbors and even strangers in line at the grocery store. some were on the verge of clinical depression due to inability to connect or get meaningful work. two said they had actually taken antidepressants. so the overall story was of a pretty harsh reality of daily life as an expat in a place where people felt invisible and rejected. and the people of billund were outraged. how dare foreigners complain about this idyllic little land? they should just pack it up and go back to wherever they came from.

the reaction of the politician, to declare that this is denmark and all municipal business must take place in english simply underlines the results of the report. foreigners feel rejected by danish society. he apparently advocates taking away completely the voice of the minority population within the municipality when he declares in a news story that "it's over with addressing politicians in english." how a grown man who is an elected official in a little land with a minor language can stand up and say out loud that he doesn't speak english is beyond my comprehension. the largest business within the municipality is the very successful toy maker lego. foreign workers are essential to their continued growth and success, so to deny these people, who bring jobs and money into the community, a voice is absolutely absurd. the politician actually said, "i wasn't there on the day we had english in school," so he further negates the importance of english in a globalized world. happily, there is an election coming up this autumn and foreign residents of a municipality are allowed to vote in municipal elections (at least for now, tho' the xenophobic danish people's party would like to take that away), so perhaps this clown will be shown the door and replaced by someone with a more global view. 

another interesting side note - in three articles about the report, the reporter in question never once made an attempt to contact the authors of the report for more information on methodology or the results or to have a more nuanced view on the story. and this despite declaring in a sidebar that they will spend the next week looking in depth at the contents of the report. and that's journalism today, folks.

* * *

and speaking of danish politicians, i spent yesterday with several of them. i sat down next to one of them at lunch, a heavily pockmarked older man with a shaggy and decidedly non-hipster 70s mustache and a dried sweat stain on the back of his shirt. he didn't ask me my name or tell me his (perhaps assuming i knew he was An Important City Council Member). instead, apropos one of my uncles at a family reunion, basically asked me what i did with myself to deserve the air i was using up. when i explained that i do all kinds of writing and communications in english, he asked if i was english. on the principle of not offering more than you're asked, i said no. what i should have done next was ask him what he did with himself to deserve the air he was using up. instead, i just sort of gulped and fumed a little bit about being made to feel inadequate by this unfashionable-shoe wearing git. it then came out that i was american. and where i lived. and that was that.

sometime later, as we toured a library, he asked me how long i'd been in denmark. i said 15 years and he said, "oh, well, you're danish then." i replied that i most decidedly was NOT. (funny how we're most our nationality in defensive situations.) and he asked, incredulous, why. i pointed out that i have an american passport (i've heard those are quite sought after) and why on earth would i give that up? (he'd ticked me off by then.) he said, oh, but you can have both. and i said, no, i can't. the americans would allow it, but the danes won't. even the former prime minister's own son had to give up his danish passport when he became an american citizen a few years ago. this guy should have known that, since he is from that same party!

i'm sure he's pondering ways of trying to get me thrown off the local group which is involved in establishing a "culture house," on the grounds that i'm a bad foreign influence. he probably doesn't realize that i get to vote in municipal elections. and i know who i'm not going to be voting for.  he also speaks a bit against the handsome danish men theory, as he was most decidedly not handsome (i have a photo of him, but i don't dare to publish it). but again, i'm not done pondering that one.

* * *

monty python and the holy grail lego sets. awesome.

princeton or bust

thankfully, i had no odd dreams of dominatrix school principals, instead my nightmares were of an education system bent on making sure my daughter becomes a plumber or electrician (not that those are bad professions, it's just that i'm not sure that's the route she should take).

there was much talk last evening, by an overly tan man with long, white hair (can you say 70s leftover?), of how the kids would be counseled towards their ungdomsuddannelse. already in the 8th grade, they will make a plan for their future education (because you totally know what you want to do/be when you're 13). that rings a little soviet in my ears - having the state decide what you'll be at an early age and then seeing that you become it. i think russia groomed a lot of scientists that way. but denmark's ambitions are a bit lower, it seems they're more interested in grooming carpenters and plumbers (tho' there aren't enough apprentice spots for these professions, so many people taking those courses never become those things). but, we shouldn't forget that low ambition is what keeps the danes at the top of those happy lists, so there's that.

but it all raises my hackles. partly, i will admit, because i'm not entirely clear as to what is meant by ungdomsuddannelse (youth education, if i translate literally). here, mandatory school is through the 9th grade, with an optional 10th grade (many people take that at an efterskole (a boarding school that specializes in something or other - often sports, or riding or music or even media studies)). after that, if you eventually want to go to university, you tend to go to a 3-year gymnasium (somewhere between our high school and the first year of college). if you're not university bound, you can go to technical schools of various kinds. is it those technical schools and maybe even the efterskole that are ungdomsuddannelse, or is it all of it, including gymnasium and university? that's very unclear, even in the three pages of materials they gave to us last night.

basically, i want to know how they're going to help my child get into princeton. or if they're going to try to lead her down a path towards moped mechanic (that was actually mentioned). i'm being a bit facetious here. i'm not sure i really want her to go to princeton (berkeley or columbia would be ok too), but my point is that i want her to think that anything is possible and not that she has to follow a narrowly prescribed path determined by some aging hippie who didn't even know her when she was in middle school. and how will we ever know where she's going if she doesn't take the SAT?

that's the other thing that's not clear. since there's not much standardized testing in denmark, how do they determine what they call uddannelsesparathed (educational readiness). is it entirely subjective? is it determined by a bunch of teachers who frankly, have been questionably educated themselves in seminarium that are somewhere in the neighborhood of a suburban american junior college academically? are the kids out here in udkantsdanmark (the countryside/fringes) especially pushed in the direction of such professions by current political forces? (a story i heard on the radio yesterday suggested as much.) can your location determine what you can be when you grow up? the future of my child is hanging in the balance here and i can't see what it's balancing upon.

the only thing that's clear is that it's denmark's current goal to get these kids out there and through their education as quickly as possible so they can begin to be good little taxpayers. let's face it, those politicians aren't getting any younger, so they need to ensure that the next generation is paying for their pensions.

and now i'm off to google boarding schools in switzerland.

* * *

that's four more items off my "to blog" list from the parents' meeting last evening.

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.

overt racism becoming endemic in denmark

even our little black bunny was the last one to find a home.

in recent weeks, there's been some media swirl about a horrendously racist, pompous, superior and fascist-leaning blog post written by a danish politician, marie krarup (of the danish people's party (dansk folkeparti)), after a trip to new zealand. the blog was published on berlingske's website and is an absolutely stunning exercise in xenophobic, arrogant offensiveness. there is a full text (in danish and english) here. krarup stands by her racist remarks and refuses to apologize. but how do you apologize for stupidity?

being shockingly racist is nothing new for krarup - look here to see what she said about a visit to niagra falls. since it's in danish, and i do realize that's a minor language, i'll tell you what she said, "Niagara Falls in Canada has been allowed to remain White. In this multi-culti country a white person is always seen next to a black, one brown and one yellow. And they're all smiling so happily! As if to say to us: multi-culti is really good! But the waterfall is just white." this was posted on her facebook page and the comments all glowingly agree with her that multiculturalism is bad. jesper (the peasant) frederiksen actually comments,  "multi-culti functions only if there aren't too multi of the antisocial culti." i am rendered speechless by such a public display of racism in an elected official.

when i first came to denmark fifteen years ago, it was frowned upon to say things like this in public. a politician's career would have been over for such behavior. now, it's commonplace and even encouraged. granted the danish people's party is the most extreme right wing example, but they're the ones who have made it ok to bash foreigners and lump them all together into one big, bad group that's out to destroy the danish way of life.

all of this underlines the power of storytelling. for a good decade, in denmark the story has been told and repeated that foreigners, especially from the middle east, come to denmark to cause trouble and live off the supposed fat of the danish welfare state. there has a been an entire bureaucracy built up around a push for integration that looks a whole lot more like assimilation. and fear of The Other has become the order of the day.

i've spent some time in recent weeks interviewing foreigners who have moved to denmark for various reasons and i can safely conclude that this rhetoric and tone are not without damaging psychological consequences on the immigrants themselves. in the push to be stuffed into boxes at danish language schools, many of these people end up in a fog of depression and loneliness. they are bewildered that their danish neighbors don't speak to them and aren't interested in them. they feel isolated by a lack of language and bewildered by a culture that feels like it's rejecting them (and may actually BE rejecting them). many more of them than is healthy made the distressing statement that they began to feel they didn't know who they were anymore.

perhaps this is a common phenomenon for all who are in exile (chosen or not). it's hard to retain who you are in the face of an alien culture and way of thinking. especially when a psychological switch lays the entire burden to suck it up and integrate at your feet as the alien.

it's important to return to enlightenment values which value all individuals as equal and equally having something to offer if we are just open to what that might be. we've got to stop the negative, racist rhetoric in this country. we need to get a whole lot more outraged about it and show the elitist, fascist marie krarups of this country that it's not acceptable. i'm increasingly convinced that as individuals we can and must make a difference, starting right here in our own neighborhoods. my project gives me a chance to do something and i definitely intend to use that chance.

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.