culture clash or the ribbons are the wrong color

whenever you enter into a new activity, you find yourself immersed in a new and sometimes bewildering culture. tho' i grew up showing horses, it's apparently very different to show horses in the US (admittedly 25 years ago) than it is in denmark.

the first thing i did was read the rulebook. i could see that all of the photos of dressage competition showed people with white saddle pads, white breeches, white gloves and white leg wraps on their horses. i found the white breeches in the rules and a paragraph that said you could wear gloves that were the same color as your coat (which had to be black) if you wished. i read that the saddle blanket should be a neutral color and could find nothing at all about the color of the boots/legwraps. but when we got to the show, it was obvious that only white would do. our black saddle pad with a hint of purple stitching and purple legwraps were not going to cut it. luckily, we could borrow a white pad and just forgo the legwraps.  it seemed to be some strange and unpredictable collusion of rules and what's in fashion.

the next thing that seemed strange was that the judge sat in a vehicle that was parked down at the end of the arena. not along the side, where she might have been able to see something, but at the far end. furthermore, the judge would honk the horn of the car when the person should begin their program. because a honking horn isn't at all going to scare a highly-strung warmblood. the weather was iffy and there were patches of showers all day long, but the judge judged on from the front seat of the car, windshield wipers flapping. i was incredulous, but everyone else seemed to consider it completely normal.

then, there were the ribbons. where i grew up, first place is blue, second is red and yellow is third. here, apparently red is first place, blue is second place and green is third. so you can see above that matilde won a first and a third in the jumping, rather than the second and sixth place that it looks like to the conditioning of my culture.

for the dressage competition, everyone is dressed and outfitted the same, so it seems very egalitarian (and thus very danish). apparently, there's more leeway and fashion at play in the jumping, as people had bright colored saddle pads and boots on their horses and one girl even wore pink britches (tho' i did hear some people expressing surprise over that). everyone has a bright, pretty fleece that they cover their horse with before and after they compete and there seems to be some fashion at work in those as well. because despite the uniform involved, people do want to express themselves.

but it's interesting, these clashes of culture. i do tend to like things that push me out of my rut, but the judge sitting inside of a car during the judging was where i drew the line. i just can't get my head around that. i can appreciate the need to stay warm and dry, but what about the need to actually be able to SEE the performance of the horse you're judging? still, i didn't hear any complaints about the scoring, so i suppose it must work (either that or people have just been culturally conditioned to accept it and not question it).

such an experience also engages many conflicting feelings...the need to belong and fit in and the need to resist. i can see that i have much more need to resist than my child has - she wants very much to belong and be like the others. so i guess i'll be buying her some white gloves, a white pad and white legwraps for the next time.

oh, and i can't resist showing you how brilliantly matilde jumped on sunday to earn those ribbons above. one of the older, more experienced girls from the riding school rode her very well. and she looked fetching in red. 

the agony of defeat

i grew up showing horses and ever since we got matilde, i've been hoping that sabin would want to show as well. she's having a private lesson on matilde once a week and is also part of a group lesson once a week, so she felt ready this weekend when her riding club hosted a show.

she normally rides in the indoor arena, so she got very nervous when she found out that she'd have to show outdoors. her nervousness grew when we saw that the arena was shortened down for the ponies using some of the jumps as a barrier. matilde LOVES to jump and when she sees jumps, she gets a bit hyper. top this off with the judge sitting in a black SUV down at the end of the arena, where there are normally no cars parked and the fact that she had no chance to take a walk around the arena to show matilde the perimeter and a severe case of the nerves set in. for both horse and rider. suffice it to say it wasn't an ideal first horse show experience and there were tears. pretty much all around.

and while i would have done just about anything to make sure her first experience was a good one, we do learn from everything that happens to us. and perhaps even more so from the bad experiences. and it could have been much worse - she didn't fall off, she just felt so nervous that she transmitted that to the horse (which is a learning experience as well) and went off pattern in her worry that she wasn't going to be able to prevent matilde from jumping the jumps they had used as the barrier (which thankfully matilde didn't do, tho' it looked for a minute like she was going to).

happily, late in the day, she wanted to saddle up and ride again with a friend (after declaring immediately after her class that she would never try to show again) and so we ended the day on a good note with her horse. today, one of the big girls from the riding school showed matilde in two jumping classes and got first in one and third place in the other - so sabin could feel proud of her horse and know that it was possible to show her successfully.

it's heart-breaking at times to be a parent. and i think that today we're especially protective of our children - trying to make everything easy for them and sheltering them from as much adversity as we can. i felt so terrible for sabin that it didn't go well on her first try in the show ring. i didn't necessarily expect her to win, but i thought she was ready. she had practiced her pattern dozens of times and knew it by heart. but we hadn't practiced outdoors - mostly since it's been raining pretty much steadily for at least the past two weeks. and when you're relying on an animal that has a mind of its own, you simply can't control everything. it was a hard lesson to learn, but i am sure she'll recover from it.  and maybe even be stronger for it. and perhaps i will be too.

sunset brings hope for change

after ten long years of a mediocre, xenophobic danish government utterly without vision, a new government was elected yesterday. fittingly, late afternoon, the sun broke through in all of its golden, autumn glory.  let's hope it's a sign of things to come.

happy weekend, one and all.

believe it or not

an equally random photo for a random post

i am consistently amazed at people's need to tell their stories. seemingly especially if the stories are full of strife and sorrow and woe. they have a great desire for commiseration and in being confirmed in their sense of having been done wrong. it makes it easy to gather material for a book, but i have to say that it is making for a rather bleak story. but maybe there simply aren't any bright spots in the welfare state, even the lauded scandinavian kind.

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believe it or not, there are still people (in this otherwise very prosperous ostensibly western society) who don't have any education beyond primary school.

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it's election day in denmark today. the race is close, but it looks like after ten years of the blue guys, it will go over to the red. because denmark seems to have adopted those same colors as they use in the US elections. tho' the politicians are all well to the left of the american ones - blue or red. i don't get to vote, as i'm not a citizen, but i'm confident husband will vote correctly.

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believe it or not, there are people who don't know how to type.

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it's sometimes really, really hard to maintain anthropological distance. but absolutely essential for maintenance of sanity. (this is really a reminder to myself, so if you don't understand it, that's ok.)

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believe it or not, there are people who still have nokia phones.

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my drunk kitchen is totally cracking me up.

thank you bill.

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i'm feeling much better now. sometimes you just have to clear your head of all the little stuff.

thinking differently

 why be normal?

 and use a leash?

 a whole new way...

of walking the dog.

now that's innovative thinking.

putting things out there

potential title sighted in copenhagen

i have something that i want to say out loud. both because writing is the new praying and because sometimes it makes things more real to put them out there and share them (there's probably a whole 'nother blog post in why that is).

i'm writing a book. it's non-fiction and it's about the famous and much-lauded danish welfare state. it's in the style of barbara ehrenreich's kind of under-cover journalism, best exemplified in her nickel and dimed: under-cover in low wage usa.  in this vein, i'm trying on the danish welfare state first hand, experiencing what they put people through myself, as well as interviewing a wide variety of people and gathering their stories. it's shaping up to be a rather fascinating story - one of humiliation and hopelessness and busywork and earnest people who want to do the right thing, but whose hands are tied by bureaucracy and it's also a story of wasted, misplaced funds and consultancies becoming very wealthy on the backs of the poor sods who are out of work. but it's a story of good people too - people sincerely interested in helping and motivating.

i don't have a publisher or an agent and i honestly don't know the first thing about getting either one of those, but i know that it's a very interesting story and i feel compelled to write it. and i think that in light of a lot of political conversations going on around the world, there's a place and a market for it. and while initially, i thought it was a rather dry subject, it turns out that it's full of humanity and shaping up to be just a really good story.

if there's one thing i'm learning from this process, it's that your network is everything, so any and all advice is appreciated.

a world worth living in

september 11. all over the world, people are marking the tenth anniversary. i say marking because celebrating, that word we normally associate with anniversaries, isn't the right word, is it? like many, watching all of these programs and listening to the radio (which is mostly what i did, because i was driving across the country today), gave me pause to remember where i was and what i was doing when i heard about what was happening to the world trade center on that day ten years ago.

i was, just as i did today, driving. that day, i was listening to de sorte spejder, an afternoon radio program that was normally very funny in a biting, ironic way. so when i heard anders and anders talking about a plane crashing into the world trade center in NYC, i initially thought they were playing an elaborate radio joke. then, there was a second plane, and i thought hmm, they're carrying this one on a little farther than usual. i think initially i imagined a small private plane, piloted by a near-sighted, lost midwesterner, but when there were two and then they began talking about the pentagon too, i thought ok guys, this is a radio joke taken too far. but then i arrived to pick up sabin from her daycare and found out it wasn't a joke at all. but far from it.

i don't think any of us could have imagined how that event would change the world. there has been a shift in mentality worldwide. we are more wary, less open to strangers, more insular and protecting of ourselves. we put up with the most absurd things at airport security - removing half our clothes just to enter the airport. we're simply much more afraid. our innocence is lost.

tho' they say it's the most analyzed event in history, i'm still uncertain that we learned the right lessons from it. i certainly don't feel that the lessons we learned have made the world a better or safer place. in fact, i'm a little concerned that the crumbling of those towers started a crumbling of the world as we know it and we haven't yet seen the end of that crumble, let alone started to rebuild it.

so when on the eve of september 11, i saw the sign above on the side of a building in copenhagen, advertising an exhibition about what makes a city worth living in, i started thinking about what constitutes a world worth living in. i think that many of us are in a process of rethinking that.

i'm still thinking about it and don't have any final answers, but i have some ideas. they have to do with performing meaningful work for which i can see the results (and which do not involve selling my soul). they have to do with being closer to and more in tune with nature. they have to do with consuming less. increasingly, i also think that the key is more openness and less expectations. i think achieving these things is a process and doesn't happen all at once. maybe the events of september 11 started us on this path, or maybe it would have happened anyway.