evangelists on my doorstep

two kindly-looking ladies with a bible and a pamphlet in their hands just knocked at my door. they came to sell me a future - one that is apparently laid out for me in the bible. and here i was, thinking it was a historical document, not a crystal ball. i didn't really let them stick around to fill me in (tho' i wouldn't have  minded knowing the next date of the rapture, since i never did figure out what to wear to the last two).

call me crazy, but i just find belief to be a very personal thing and not really something i want to share with strangers who knock on my door out of the blue. it seems to me that a whole lot of objectionable stuff is going on in the world in the name of religion and the bible and gods of all ilks.

but i do believe that god or a higher force or whatever you'd like to call it, is found all around us, in glorious skies and the sun breaking through the clouds and beautiful silhouettes of trees against a foggy horizon. it's there that i find god.

that's what i should have told them.

instead, i told them i was american and had had enough religion to last a lifetime...

what will you do with your weekend?

i'm no longer speaking to our car. we're supposed to be going to an 80th birthday party, but car troubles are preventing it. and that makes me quite sad. 80 is such an achievement! and i know it will be quite the event and i'm sad to miss it. this is the second time our jutlandish car has let us down when it was time to go to copenhagen - i'm beginning to wonder if it has something against the place. hmm...

yesterday, i visited the most fabulous leather store and stocked up on supplies for making iPad and laptop covers, so i'll comfort myself by using my day wisely.

i read this post and began to dream about there being something like the brooklyn brainery in my area. if there's going to be, i'll have to start it. i could also get into the idea of a society for the advancement of social studies in my neighborhood. i mean, an organization whose motto is: "all the history you knew but forgot, and all the booze you need to forget it again." has got to be good.

happy weekend, one and all...and if you want to read something interesting about the neanderthal genome, go here.

the truth about reality

the truth about all of this truth thing is that what i've been writing this week isn't really different from what i usually write. because with me, you tend to get the truth...if i'm in a bad mood, have a headache, am happy or sad, frustrated, ecstatic - i don't hide these things very well. but, just as a map can't truly depict a place, you can never write everything. and let's face it, no one would want to read it if you did. so we all pick the highlights and sometimes the lowlights. it's just how it is. and it's what i love about the genre of blog - it's really whatever you want it to be. i think i just got a little tired of all of the in-your-face, groomed, styled and curated perfection i was seeing out there.

the truth is that despite living in an old house which needs lots of work, we have a pretty good life. and although all of the changes we've been through in past year and a half have been stressful and even worrying at times, we're happy with where we're at and the decisions that have brought us here. on a still evening, when we step outside and breathe in the fresh air and hear the sounds of birds in the trees or the crunching of a horse, life seems pretty much to be exactly as it should be.

that's not to say that it can't be improved. yes, we should have less stuff. yes, we should have a place to put it all away. yes, i should waste less time in front of the computer and spend more time in the garden. i should procrastinate less and sew more. i should more consistently believe in the things i'm working on and in my abilities. i should watch fewer crappy television shows. but it's a process. and nothing happens overnight. but all of that messy process is where life is lived - in the contradictions, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the happiness and the unhappiness and the moments of feeling like a heroic parent in comparison to those crazy people on toddlers & tiaras or that awful show about the insanely expensive themed child parties.

as one of my favorite russian writers, andrei bitov, wrote, "unreality is a condition of life." so i think i'll just chill about it. hang out with the cool bloggy people who seem real (you know who you are) and try to avoid all that curated perfection for awhile.

things i want to remember

Malynne Sternstein will lie to her students, she’ll overwhelm them with reading, she’ll assign texts that some, including her own teaching assistants, believe are simply too hard for undergraduates. She’ll also employ, what she calls, “radical friendliness ... I’m almost too friendly for it to be authentic; it too must be questioned.”
For Sternstein, Associate Professor in Slavic Languages and Literature, these are all tactics in her broad effort to cultivate an atmosphere of learning.
“I really want the classroom to be a safe place, a safe place to have conflict.”
And creating that place, Sternstein says, so often begins by creating “the upset.”
A scholar of Czech literature, who has authored a book on the Czech historical avant-gardes, Czechs of Chicagoland, and articles on such topics as iconic language, gender and citizenship in the arts, Sternstein’s scholarly work explores the intersection between art and literature, film and politics.
She teaches classes on Vladimir Nabokov, the modern central European novel, kitsch and the Czech artist Jan Svankmaher. She also teaches the popular class, “Critical Methodology Theory: From Adorno to Zizek,” a foundational class in the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities that she chaired for several years.
In the “Critical Methodology Theory” class, she often will choose the most difficult, most obscure texts.
Sternstein will choose an obscure text by the Lacanian psychoanalyst, Slavoj Zizek, rather than one of his more popular, perhaps accessible works. “If you teach a well-known text, some students will already have a cocktail-conversation answer ready. They come into the class with preconceptions about the text. It’s very hard to dislodge.” Sternstein wants texts that students may not know, so they have to read and react.
Of her penchant for lying, she says, “I will ask questions that are fundamentally wrong.” It’s another way to provoke her students. In a recent discussion about Lolita, she asked, “Was Lolita a compassionate individual?” That’s the wrong question, Sternstein said. “Lolita is just a character in a book. The book is about language. I just wanted to get them to call me on it.”
At the beginning of her Nabokov class, she informed students, “I am going to lie at times. A student quickly responded. “Are you lying now?” “That was a good sign,” Sternstein said. “I could tell it was going to be a good class.”
Sternstein says she has no teaching model inspired by a high school or college teacher, but rather her pedagogical strategy is a reaction to her own frustration with the belief that “there is a right answer.” Sternstein felt that so often that right answer was simply about learning how restate what the instructor was saying.
Her own approach evolved gradually. While teaching “Human Being and Citizen,” Sternstein’s teaching assistant challenged her, openly questioning her decision to assign History of Sexuality, by Michel Foucault, as part of a broader discussion of Genesis. The TA argued that the students, mostly first-years, were too young, that they were inexperienced readers who wouldn’t understand the text. To her surprise, Sternstein found that she wasn’t threatened by the challenge, but rather exhilarated.
Sternstein also found she didn’t mind assigning texts that are considered “too hard.” “If they understand Foucault on sexuality in Eden, that’s fantastic. But even if they misunderstand it, that’s fine.” In teaching a difficult paragraph on, say, Lacan, which most students struggle to understand, she found that working together as a group helped students understand the passage.
Another watershed moment for Sternstein came when she discovered the value of “hot moments.” The most dramatic example of this was early in her career at Chicago when she was teaching a Richard Wright essay in a Humanities core course. The class had proceeded calmly to that point. “It was staid,” she recalled. Two students were dominating a discussion of race. Finally, a student, who had never talked in the class, grew so agitated by the political correctness of the discussion that he entered the fray. He raised his voice. He stood up on his chair, and said, “It’s impossible to move forward when you can still feel the shackles on your ankles.”
This was a dramatic, tense moment. But following that, the student became an engaged interlocutor, and the whole atmosphere of the classroom changed. There was, she recognized, a great benefit to the “hot moment.”
For Sternstein, teaching also is exciting because it’s a chance to make new discoveries. “I’ve read Lolita more than 10 times,” she said. “But every time we read it in class, someone finds a trifle. They’ll notice something in a certain way. This can be an ecstatic moment for me.”

i love these thoughts.

the truth: too much perfume

the currents - these are out at the moment and in regular rotation

i've been posting a "scent of the day" on facebook for a couple of weeks now. it was a kind of reaction to some facebook friends who post the song that's in their head when they wake up in the morning and i thought it would be funny. i've written before about my perfume collection but i never really owned up to how much perfume i really have. in fact, until i thought about this whole truth-telling thing, i never dared to count it. but now, i have. and it's not pretty. 47 different kinds.  on the bright side i will never have to buy perfume again as long as i live.

a peek in the perfume box

it took a decade to build up this collection, but bear in mind, i spent a few years passing regularly through an airport duty free. all of it is bought in duty free. not because the prices are better (i think they're pretty similar), but because they have the best selection - at least the good ones do. it's funny, i can pass by a department store perfume counter without even being tempted, but let me loose in the duty free in copenhagen or singapore and watch out!

the large majority of this collection was acquired before i began striving for a simpler, less consumer-oriented life and i'm proud to say that 2011 is almost over and i haven't bought any perfume at all. plus, i only bought one in 2010, so i have improved. i would actually donate some of it, but i'm not sure that the second-hand shops would take partial bottles.

as those of you who are friends with me on facebook know from the daily updates, i actually use perfume on a daily basis - and i don't tend to the wear the same one for two days running. i keep an ever-rotating collection out on the shelf in the bathroom and on the shelf in the bedroom - 5-6 each place - something to suit the season and any potential mood.

there are romantic scents, power scents for difficult meetings, feminine ones and unisex ones. there are ones which are bonded inextricably with memories of certain times and places. there really are only 1 or 2 that i don't ever use...jill sander sensations and calvin klein contradiction. both of those went weird on me when i was pregnant with sabin and i haven't been able to stand them since.

i recognize that this is probably a symptom of a larger disease of the soul, but i feel it's one that's in my past. and the daily enjoyment of my previous obsessive collecting actually lives on in a positive way, so although it was pretty excessive (wasn't everything in the naughties?), it wasn't all bad.

now it's your turn...what are you a little bit obsessive about collecting?

the truth: there's too much pressure on mothers

baby sabin (and smoochie)

a friend of mine woke up very early one morning late last winter to find herself in labor. it was 4:30 or so and her second child, so she decided a leisurely shower was in order. after the shower, she pampered herself with nice-smelling lotion and dried her long, blonde hair. after it was dry, she commenced to flatten it with her flat iron. as one does, when one is about to depart for the hospital to have a baby. after carefully doing her makeup, her baby brain decided that a bit of fake tan was in order and she proceeded to apply the bronzing lotion. about halfway through, she realized that the contractions were coming with what began to smack of alarming regularity, so she called out to her husband that they needed to get going NOW. they deposited their 2 and a half year old daughter with the neighbors, who they had roused from sleep, and tore off to the hospital, where just a few hours later, they took delivery of their lovely, healthy baby boy. her husband, commemorating it on his iPhone (of course), showed her the first photo and to her horror, her mascara had run and her carefully flattened, silky hair was all a tangle. the various drips and tubes running into her arm had left spots of white in the midst of her lovely tan. and she realized that she was reeking of that smell that even the best fake tanning lotion cannot hide. in all, quite the memorable moment. when she tells it, it's so hilarious that you are falling out of your chair laughing, even tho' you might be in the midst of a rather posh bar at the time.

and while i laughed until i cried, i think it's a symptom of the pressure on mothers today. pressure i don't think was on me ten years ago when sabin was a baby. at that time, the only pressure i recall was heavy encouragement from the danish midwives to give birth without drugs. in the end, i was so ill, that i had an emergency c-section and it's still a bit of a fog to me. but i have never felt for one second badly that i "missed out" on natural childbirth and that's the only thing i recall being given some grief over. i can tell you that after having a temperature of 40°C for a week before delivering sabin, i most definitely did not put on makeup or fix my hair.

it's also true that i made all of sabin's baby food...cooking up organic veggies, whizzing them up in the blender and freezing them in ice cube trays to be doled out in baby-sized portions. but ten years ago, that was looked on as a heroic act, above and beyond the call of duty. today, it's expected and you'll be looked askance upon by your mothers' group and your neighbors if you're not doing it. you'll actually have to apologize for using jars of baby food today. bad mother.

i'm not sure if we placed this pressure on ourselves or if it's the culture at large, but i do think that all of this perfection in the blogosphere i'm swimming against the stream of this week contributes heavily to it. why on earth did it even occur to my friend to flat iron her hair, do full makeup and put on fake tan to go to the hospital to deliver her baby? is it one too many shots of perfect princesses emerging as svelte as before from the hospital just minutes after delivering twins? is it glowing reports of natural, organic home births featuring pictures of glowing, dewy, happy mothers and their swaddled babies? is it the stoicism of the 70s parents of today's young mothers - who were all natural and free of drugs (the legal ones at least) and clad in home-crocheted dresses, baby tied to them in a sling after they popped it out effortlessly (to hear them tell it)?

and not to mention the pressure to enjoy and love every minute with your child that today's mothers endure...if you don't spend every moment lovingly teaching your child to play with precisely the right toys to develop their brain, it's practically child abuse. i think there was a time when mothers' groups could be a support group of sorts, where you could discuss your breastfeeding issues and your sleepless nights, but today, there's so much pressure to report that it's all wonderful, your baby is in the 98th percentile in everything, you don't miss sleep, your nipples are fine and your partner is the perfect father. there's no safe space anymore to be real.

i don't know what it is, but i'm glad my child is ten and that i don't have to compete in today's baby race. i'm pretty sure it would been frowned upon to drag a 2 and a half year old across the atlantic and drop her off during a stopover in chicago with an uncle she hardly knew, to stay for two weeks while i went on to business meetings in seattle (because her father was away on a 3-week exercise in norway). it's quite amazing how things change in only ten years. (ok, i admit people probably frowned at that even then, but not to my face.)

all of this makes me glad that there are bloggers who happen to be mothers who are real. go read c is for capetown. it's the only way we're gonna change this and divert all of this pressure and get back to our normal lives.

the truth: it's a mess around here

one of the most disheartening things about browsing blogs, pinterest and flickr is all of the perfection and perfect styling. i don't believe that people's lives are actually so perfectly styled all the time. i do my share of cropping photos and advantageously placing things so as not to include clutter, so i'm not completely condemning it - sometimes we have a need to appear perfect, both to ourselves and to the world. but mostly, i think it's exhausting. and at times it fills me with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, because my house is full of spider webs and bits of straw on the carpet and dust on all of the surfaces.

paper gets stacked and half-finished projects piled up. and when it gets bad enough, i go on a cleaning frenzy and tidy it all up and feel much better for a few minutes. tho' curiously, i often don't really feel that great during the cleaning frenzy, in fact, i often find that i'm fuming about all manner of little irritations while i manically clean.

probably worst of all is the "dining room." it's the main big room of the oldest part of the house (the part that's going to be torn down) and it is still (after a year) a repository of boxes of things that shouldn't be out where it's cold and damp - fabric, seasonal clothes, pretty paper, books, etc.) they actually can't be unpacked because without having the house finished, we don't have enough bookshelves or space. so it has to be the way it is. additionally, it's the only place where the dining table fits, so it also has to be there. during the summer, we eat out in our terrace and this room is only used for my sewing projects, but now that it's cold, we eat here too.

i think to an extent you become immune to it and you don't see the boxes anymore and just go about living your life, knowing that it's a sort of long-term temporary thing that you have to live with. but there are times when i look at the perfect scenes in the blogosphere and feel rather frustrated by it all. however, this is a process that we're in and it's going to take time.  deep breath.

as much as i love to cook, i'm not that big on cleaning it all up afterwards. maybe because the room itself isn't that inviting with those pink cupboards and the stained, cheap linoleum floor (why bother to try to keep it obsessively marginally clean if it doesn't show anyway). mostly, husband tidies up after dinner (he is such a keeper) and i'm grateful for both that and having a dishwasher. again, it's something that i know i have to live with - next summer the new "curry kitchen" will be in out in the end of the barn and we'll be able to stop using this uninspiring space.

but now you know what it's really like at my house.

anyway, this is the kind of truth-telling i was thinking of (not name-calling or other such nasty things - i get that out of my system on a private blog). i just don't believe that lives are styled and curated in reality the way they are in today's blogosophere.

so now, it's your turn for some truth, are you relieved or horrified?