giving space for the madness

tons of writing to do (no less than seven pieces to finish), so what did i do today? of course, i cleaned and tidied like a madwoman. no more boxes in the upstairs hall. all of the laundry is done, folded and yes, even put away! i even made a dent in the exploded bomb crater that is my laundry room. but did i finish any of those articles? no, i i did not. did i work on them. yes, but only a little bit. i couldn't sit still when there was so much tidying up to do. tidying up of the kind my cleaning lady doesn't do--she cleans, she doesn't tidy up. there's a difference.

i envy people who live somewhere where there are no ongoing projects. no sauna going up behind their studio, no beds to be planted in the garden, no hallway to be finished, no pizza/bread oven being built their garden which requires the occasional consultation with husband and our fabulous polish contractor who we would like to adopt, no cords hanging from the ceiling where husband is putting up some lamps. people whose houses are in order. they can come home, sit down, relax. they can breathe. they can have a glass of wine and spend an hour with their book.

you'd think with all of the time i spend at home, since i do work at home quite a lot, that i'd be one of those people. but i'm not. most days, my working at home really is a lot of work. most days, i'm really quite focused. today, it wasn't as much work and focus as it should have been, but that's because the deadline looms. later this evening, or tomorrow, the right amount of panic will kick in and i'll sit down and finish all of those pieces.

i'm trying to be patient with myself, to just let this thing that i always do unfold. and hope that it becomes something beautiful...

how i spent kristihimmelfart

kristihimmelfart has something to do with easter. it's ascension (ascention?) day. or whatever. i don't really know what it means. i wasn't really paying attention that time i got sent to bible school for a week when i was 4. i think it's a funny name but that's because i'm kinda simple when it comes to it and it involves the word fart. i wasn't around anyone named kristi today, so i don't know about the farts, but i do know about frogs. because i spent quite a long time trying to photograph frogs. they were singing like crazy before i went down with the camera. do you think they would continue when i got there? of course they wouldn't, so i never did catch them with their little cheeks all puffed out. and i had a little staring contest with one (which i lost, undoubtedly because i don't think they can blink). but it was green and glorious and wonderful to be outside. i'll be able to sit down to work tomorrow, totally refreshed and renewed because i was able to spend most of this glorious day outside.

i also found out something about husband today. he actually has a blog. he created it, but has never written anything on it. and to think i thought he thought we were all completely mad. 5 ants are more than 4 elephants. he's super clever, don't you love that title?  husband is such a keeper. i'm not sure he's really going to blog, but i followed him, just in case. i think i've already been following him for rather a long time, but now it's official.

time for a quickie*

ha, gotcha there, eh? but it's not what you think, it's just a quick blog before i go back outside. it's kristihimmelfart here today and that's a holiday--ascention day or something like that, tho' i like to think of it as a day in honor of everyone named kristi who farts, because that's funnier.

i just wanted to drop a quick line about the brief wondrous life of oscar wao, which we're reading for our new book club blog--hermit book club. i saw it last month in a bookstore, picked it up, read that it was about a fat dominican kid who lived in jersey and put it back down. what a mistake that was! it's unbelievably good. fresh, different, very right now (in the best way). junot diaz recently won the pulitzer for it and it is SO deserved.

for me, who would have written a dissertation on eastern european postmodern literature (if i'd gone ahead and written that dissertation), i find that it carries postmodern literature to a whole new level. it represents a maturation of postmodernity which takes the novel as a genre towards its next incarnation. it uses some of the devices used by the now unfortunately dead david foster wallace in infinite jest, but either those footnotes as a novelistic device have grown up now or diaz just does it better. it's like an infinite jest for the noughties (thank you, guardian, for that wonderful word)

although spanning quite a lot of the 20th century (i'm only about 1/3 in--and yes, it's so good, i couldn't help but write about it already), it feels like it captures something of the zeitgeist right now. perhaps it's due to the language itself, i don't really know (as of yet).

but i just wanted to share this and say that it's not too late to join us on hermit book club when we talk about this book next week. run out, get it now. it's fantastic. and as you can see, it's possible to talk about it when you haven't even read the whole thing.

* ok, that didn't turn out to be that quick, but i'm leaving the title for fun, like jules did earlier this week.

disco underworld voting!

if you haven't voted yet on discounderworld to determine which articles will be in the year-end print issue, please do go vote (preferably for me, of course, since it's me asking). i'm trailing by a nose--41% to 45% for the leader. stacey is doing a seriously cool magazine, so if you haven't seen it, do go have a look. the voting button is at the end of the article. and i really do want to be in that year-end issue!

she was born in a small town

since i feel a little bit like their fairyblogmother, i am going to take the liberty of doing a 5 things i love about growing up in a small town list ala VEG & extranjera over on Ocean (and to think i was calling it siamese. my bad.). plus, you know how i love lists. and need an assignment. i've written about growing up in a small town kind of a lot of times before, but i'm not sure i've ever really thought specifically about what was good about it.

1.  getting to try everything

in a small town school, you don't have to choose whether you're a band person or a cheerleader or a theatre person or smart girl or a sporty girl. you can be all of them. and in fact, the only way the school thrives is if everybody does everything. so you try it all and find out what you like and what you're good at. and you learn not to be afraid of trying new things. and that will get you a long way in life.

2.  getting a driver's license (learner's permit anyway-able to drive without an adult between sunup and sundown) at 14

there was nothing to run into. it was flat and the ditches were wide.

3.  having horses

i grew up with horses. we always had them. we showed them, and i've written about my horse trainer before. she was awesome. and having horses is just a wholesome thing to do. you learn responsibility. hard work. caring. getting up early to feed. mucking out stalls. and that standing in the barn at dusk on a summer night, listening to the snuffling and munching of a horse is just plain good for your soul. and your sanity.

4.  big old house with a front porch

the house "in town" that we lived in 'til i was 10 or so had a front porch with a porch swing, big columns and it was all covered in vines. i loved sitting in there in the cool shade, protected from prying eyes by the vines, watching people go by. that was great. there was a silver milk box there and i remember milk being delivered into that box (yup, i'm old). ice cream jim came up on that porch dressed as santa one christmas. lots of good memories and some not so good. it was on that front porch that our dog stella bit my friend tracey on the nose. tracey kinda deserved it, she had totally gotten in stella's face and stella was an old crotchety shetland sheep dog. and there that time i got a huge sliver in my foot and my dad had to sit on me to hold me down while mom got it out with a needle and a tweezers. ouch. but for the most part, it was awesome for dressing up and playing laura from little house and just swinging on the swing.

5. always feeling safe 

it was a totally safe place to grow up. i don't even think our house had locks on the doors and if it did, no one had seen the key in years. you knew everyone and they knew you. and you trusted each other. and looked out for each other. i think it has made me a person who, for the most part, feels at ease in the world and isn't afraid. it's grounding to grow up feeling safe like that. i'm glad i had that ground to grow up on.

so those are my five things. what are yours?

tuesday means it's time for randomness

totally gratuitous picture of an airplane wing

because she did it and so did she 

and i hate to be albanienated (great word HRH TFM!)

yes, it's time for one of those random posts. is it usually on a tuesday? do i always feel random on tuesdays? does my brain always overload on tuesday? these are just a small selection of the random thoughts going through my head at the moment. here are the rest.

: : danes should not rap. they have not suffered enough. there is no 'hood. danish sounds like crap when rapped.

: : even more so norwegians. it's just not authentic when you're so white and so upper middle class. do not rap, please. got it?

: : thankfully, i have never heard swedish rap. swedes probably have too much taste and class. and too many volvos. people never rap about a volvo. or a saab.

: : i'm a night person, not a morning person. night feels deliciously long, it stretches out to be all the time i need it to be. morning feels impossibly fleeting and bound to be interrupted by day itself. gimme night any day.

: : "i made some new spaces inside myself." --jane campion, IHT, 17/5.09

: : still doing tara's double colons instead of bullets. i love them.

: : why oh why did they make more than one episode of that ridiculous stylista show? i'm only watching again in the eternal futile hope that they are all taken out back and shot at the end of THIS one.

: : "i followed your blog now. does that mean it will come when i call it?" --monique, via googletalk, 18/5.09

: : i want a tattoo of a helleristning.

: : do you think it's possible that otherwise cool cities have pockets of dorkiness? how do they become that way when they're surrounded by coolness?

: : do you ever have the feeling that everyone else has it all figured out and you're the only one who doesn't?

: : when will the last of the dinosaurs really die out?

it's just so good to get this out. thanks for listening. if you have answers to any of these questions, please do leave a comment! or just share your own randomness. it's all good.

the things you hold onto

there's no place like home

i've lived away from my country of birth during the whole monica lewinsky thing + the entire bush administration, that's now more than a decade. people always ask me what i miss. and aside from my family, which is a given, i usually say, just The Gap. and i do miss the gap. except when they forget that what they do is make great hooded sweatshirts, but i'm confident they'll remember soon.

but when i think about it, there are other things. like hot rollers. nobody does hot rollers where i live and i'd like to have the occasional curly hair day (that would make my mom happy as well, she always thinks that a look is never really complete if you have flat hair).

and there's the fact that clabber girl baking powder is the best kind. we, of course, have baking powder too, but it's just not the same. however, our yeast (blocks of the fresh kind) totally kicks those wussy dry packets. and mom sends me clabber girl when i need it.

and although ikea now has a form of zip-loc bag available, you can't get that really nice little snack size zip-locs that are ideal for sabin's lunches. so we still import those.

i would say that i let go of other things in stages. for the first couple of years, i imported mentadent toothpaste. i loved that stuff, but now i've gotten used to colgate (because it's available here too) and i no longer need to use up valuable luggage space on that. i'm not even sure they still make it. i think i liked that little push thingie it came in.

i also would lay in a large supply of dry idea deodorant whenever i was home, but now i can deal with whatever's available on the grocery store shelf--rexona or whatever. it really all works equally well. (except when you forget to pack it.)

i miss regular access to vanity fair and atlantic monthly and the new yorker, but perhaps enjoy them more because i only get them once in awhile when i pass through an airport or city that has them, so the pain is less than i would once have imagined.

same with movies. i used to have to see every movie in the theatre on the weekend it came out. now, pretty much the only time i see movies is on a long-haul flight. and i don't miss it, not even a little bit. perhaps my taste has improved or movies have not. but with something like a new james bond, we do still go on opening weekend. (perhaps i should take a lesson from this on the whole getting rid of the t.v. notion.)

some of these are surely products of growing older, but they're also about the adaptability of humans to their surroundings. i have my frustrations with what i at times perceive as the impoliteness of danes, but for the most part, i feel i'm home. it's here my best and favorite people are and our home is filled with memories of our life, even if we use different products than i was once used to.

i think it was B who said it not long ago, home is where your books are. your toothpaste and deodorant, those change. and as you can see, my books are most decidedly here...