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. 

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

it's that beautiful.

tin can camera

things are coming up raspberries

i know it's supposed to be roses, but i don't have any roses, so you get raspberries. you know i'm rather unconventional. why be like everyone else? but i digress.

remember that meeting i was looking forward to? because i was armed (or dressed, as they would say in danish - klædt på) with the real story behind the behavior of my buddy the troglodyte? well, it had an outcome that i wouldn't have imagined or dared to wish for in my wildest dreams. after two hours of heavy discussion, tho' not heated, oddly enough, he announced at the end of the meeting that he was resigning from the board. he had a prepared, typed speech, so it wasn't a decision he arrived at during the meeting. he cited a bunch of reasons - work, other boards he was involved with, projects, and his health (all likely valid). funnily enough he didn't mention his conflict of interest in the case. but i will be mentioning it in my novel. when i depict him as a cross-dressing geisha with a monkey. you know what they say, be nice to the writer or end up a character in her novel.

sorry. i'm gleeful, but apparently not yet ready to be charitable after all he put me through. i was very glad husband was beside me during the meeting and not across from me, where i could catch his eye. as it was, i'm sure i couldn't conceal my happiness. and i didn't even really try. tho' i did manage to restrain from actually getting up and doing a spontaneous happy dance.

but i'll tell you that if i'd had a bottle of bubbly in the fridge, we'd have cracked it open when we got home. even tho' it's a monday night.

the old man and the sea

i took these photos several years ago and stumbled onto them when i was perusing an old iPhoto library the other day. i don't think i ever used them in a blog post, or at least i didn't have any recollection of doing so. i can't decide which of them i like best.  i hadn't had my camera for very long back then and i'm sure i was using automatic settings, so i can't really explain the difference between the photos, other than that i must have moved a little bit and the camera decided on a different shutter speed in between the two shots. i can't decide whether i like the slightly overexposed one best or the darker one.

i can tell you, tho', that my photography has improved dramatically since then. it seems that practice does make perfect and taking a photo every day for nigh on five years means that you inevitably get better. in fact, i was looking through those photos from the early days and cringing a little bit. but we all have to start somewhere and we have to learn and perfect our techniques and slowly improve. all those photos i've taken have been steps on a journey and represent one of the longest sustained efforts i've ever put into anything (other than gathering academic degrees). i've come a long way, baby. and it will be interesting to see what kind of photos i'm making in another five years.

which of these photos do you like best? and why?

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speaking of photos:

really interesting article and series of photos of male affection

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speaking of the sea, the operation to right the costa concordia began today (live stream here).
here's a great piece on how they're going to do it.
they say due to hull damage/weakness, they've only got one shot at it.

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 interesting review of 1000 years of european history via an animated map.
it would appear it hasn't been easy to be poland.

lego minifigure obsession: the latest additions

i accidentally typed the latest addictions above in the title, instead of additions. i don't think it's a coincidence. i am thoroughly addicted to the clever little collectible lego minifigures. i'm a sucker for cute. for cleverness. for good design. for a sense of humor. for affordability. for the mystery of the little package - like with baseball cards, you don't know what you're getting. and a kind of mania comes over me and i have to have more. it happened years ago with beanie babies as well.

and they honestly give me a childlike sense of delight. when i send sabin and her friend into legoland (the only place we've been able to find series 11) to get them, i'm so excited when they come out with the bag. they sit in the back seat, opening while i'm driving and i almost can't stand it, since it's not me who gets to peek into each package first.

with the simplest of details, so much is expressed. the shape of a hat, a little baton, a badge, a moustache.

a gap-toothed smile, little elf ears that are attached to the hat to accomodate the design of the head. a teddy bear for a friend.

a boy robot (my only series 6 purchase) and a girl robot to hold hands. they have an adorable wind-up key in their backs, once again proving that lego really gets the details right.

and this little tiki man. he has a bone in his funny bowl-cut hair. and while it's probably a bit of stereotyping, it seems to be done in good humor and admiration, not mockery. i've let him stand next to the hula girl from series 3 on the shelf. maybe they'll make some cute little south pacific babies.

and how blues brothers is this little saxophone man, with his ill-fitting wrinkled jacket and shades? seriously, how could i resist? and why should i when they make me smile the way they do.

sunday morning reflections

sunday morning finds me leisurely looking through pinterest, facebook, my flipboard blog feed and the new york times on my li'l iPad. husband always gets up and makes tea and delivers a cup, milky and sweetened with honey, so i don't have to leave the warmth of the quilts. the cats curl up next to me, purring and jockeying for position and it's pretty much my favorite hour or so of the week.

if i view the world through the lens of my various feeds, i have learned that vladimir putin has some canny editorial writers, we can no longer use the words lame, crazy or insane, disney has been infiltrated by the illuminati, the reason that time magazine didn't put putin on the cover in the US this week (he was on the cover everywhere else) was because the media is controlled by 6 corporations, sweden is awesome, there are a lot of injured, homeless animals in need of homes, iowa beat iowa state (i surmised this more from the silence of certain iowa state folks in my feed), people think it's homemade if you combine 4-5 premade ingredients (cake mixes, oreos, cool whip, jello and tortilla chips), eating the resulting sweet dessert will likely bring you closer to jesus, there is major flooding in colorado, berlin is where all the cool stuff takes place, triangles are the new circle, autumn is upon us, the latest trend in photographing food is to place it against a dark background, which serves to make it more moody and poetic and according to my myers-briggs profile (ENTP), i am sirius black from harry potter. 

i do wonder what effect this melange of input has on me? does it connect new synapses in my brain or reinforce the old ones? are my horizons expanded or narrowed? do i end up feeling helpless about my ability to do anything about the state of the world? do I even have the first clue about what state the world is in? does it take away my desire to argue against the madness before i even begin? am I even allowed to call it madness (that illuminati thing is pretty out there)? is it all a load of bullshit?

i listened to a pretentious panel of "experts" yesterday on P1 (our NPR equivalent, only even better) debate the ability of individuals to live more sustainably in practice. they justified their purchases of non-organic food, designer bags, frequent airplane travels, long showers and wasting of energy with homes filled with electronics they never turn off and ended up concluding that we as individuals cannot do anything about living more sustainably. we might as well load our grocery cart with cheap chicken and sit in front of our enormous flat screen televisions, clad in prada, planning our next holiday in bali. they decided that we should wait for governments to wake up and regulate us, since we were too lazy to take steps ourselves.

and while that's a pretty dire and cynical conclusion, and it rather pissed me off when i heard it (as i was driving instead of biking, no less) upon reflection, i don't think it's that illogical in light of the input we feed in to our brains. a lot of what we read and expose ourselves to points to individuals not being able to make one iota of difference (after all, the illuminati and those 6 corporations are controlling everything). and i'd like to say that it's lame and crazy of us, but apparently that avenue is now closed as well.

also in my various feeds, i came across a guardian piece by jonathan franzen about our frustrating way of conducting ourselves in the modern world. he harkens back to an austrian intellectual, karl kraus, who was  blogging in a journal called the torch, before blogging was invented. maybe we need to do as kraus did, and spend a lot of time reading stuff we hate, so as to be able to hate it with authority. i'll admit i'm not good at that, as i blogged the other day, i've been turning off those who post the most objectionable stuff on my facebook feed, because i don't want their vitriol polluting my mind or messing up the steady stream of photos of kittens and lego minifigures. 

i think i've said it before, but we have to start fighting back. we've been slacktivists long enough. it's time to start arguing against the madness. because not doing so clearly isn't working.

knowing the story is the key

i read in the atlantic that storytelling may be the key to our evolution. whether that's true (or provable) or not, i know that it's the key to my ability to negotiate my way through the world. from the stories i tell myself in my head about various situations to the ones i relate out loud to generate a laugh to the ones i write for my clients, stories are pretty much the central feature of my existence.

this week, a very interesting story has unfolded that has made me so much more able to handle the situation with my nemesis the troglodyte. probably the biggest problem i've had with him has been that i could find no logic in his behavior or even for his involvement in the group, let alone his desire to so firmly grip the reins of control that everyone else's thoughts and contributions are obliterated. but thanks to a story, that all makes so much more sense. because it can all be explained by plain old boring selfish economic interest. it turns out that the troglodyte owns several properties which are adjacent to one of the potential locations for our project. his desire to place a new building on a square near his properties and his stubborn and oftentimes nasty refusal to consider the possibility of remodeling the existing building that's being used a "culture house" today make so much sense in light of his selfish interest in his own bottom line. i also learned that he's in the process of trying to sell the properties to a developer, one to whom he has undoubtedly promised that the new culture house will be built nearby and bring traffic to a new square right in front of the properties. hmm, i wonder if such petty little town kings (which are surely not rare) reflect in those world corruption list standings?

funnily enough, as the various options progress with our architect, it turns out that reusing just part of the old building will result in 1500 square meters of usable space for the money that's been budgeted, whereas a new building on the tiny lot on the square will result in 410 square meters of usable space. it seems there isn't much choice there. and it will be very interesting on monday evening to see what story he tells to he continue to justify his desire for the project on the square, adjacent to his own properties.

i have the most evil delicious sense of delight in the fact that he doesn't know that anyone knows that he's the owner. he doesn't realize how easy it is to google your way to answers. he's also been very dismissive of our group's online presence and the internet in general. it seems that one doesn't do well to underestimate the power of a girl and her computer. i can't wait for this story to unfold.