a laundry list of impressions from tedx copenhagen

my head is spinning and i'm still processing the whole TEDx Copenhagen experience, so this is just a quick post to check in and make a little list of all the things i want to remember to tell you about. most important is that a tweet i tweeted during the event has quite likely landed me a radio spot tomorrow, giving advice about denmark to the new us ambassador. yup, it was that kind of day.

but don't let me forget to tell you about:

~ live musicians in the bathroom
~ the homeless guy who helped himself to some of our lunch
~ a lovely, charming young girl who invented a molecule at the age of 16
~ the crazy, bossy coffee lady
~ the lack of swag
~ how the two hosts had obviously recently broken up and couldn't stand one another
~ the human arabesque video
~ now, new, next
~ pretentious anti-everything poseurs
~ an annoying irish woman to whom i lost a competition i didn't know i had entered
~ be my eyes, an app that will let you volunteer from your couch
~ the really weird outfit the copenhagen fashion week woman was wearing
~ changing the straight world order
~ a pretentious young brit who was fighting a battle against the so-called mainstream media without knowing what their agenda was or who/what might be behind it
~ why they played 5 TED videos i could have watched at home
~ the filter project
~ why we are biologically inclined to avoid being reflective for too long
~ surprises and disappointments

but i need to process it all first, it's still tumbling around my head.

for now, i leave you with a youtube video i managed to find of kalle's world tour, a most amazing musician who may have been the highlight of TEDxCPH for me today. this will just give you a taste, but today, he combined death metal and children's music and it was awesome:

taking lessons in creativity from my child

the child is in her second round of painting lessons. she's learning so much. she really knows how to mix colors. they have been working on repetition of shapes and on seeing the shapes of things in nature. she's not pleased with this painting, but i love it and have hung it in the hallway near my desk. i took it outside to photograph it because the light sucked where it's hanging. it's bright and alive and represents a step on her painting journey and i love having it hang nearby where i'm working.

in general, i am in awe of her creativity. she looks at pinterest or more likely instagram or her facebook feed and finds a youtube tutorial and moves quickly from inspiration to action. she dressed up her keyboard (and her light switch) with washi tape the other evening. you can still see which key is which through the tape and since it's washi, it won't get all sticky and be ruined if she decides to take it off again.

she painted up these vans to resemble a starry night sky. she's so pleased with the result that she doesn't wear them that much, since she doesn't want to ruin them, but that's another story. she also dolled up an old pair of converse as an homage to her favorite boy band 1D. some of her classmates are amazed that she's allowed to alter her shoes and clothing the way she is (she put a whole bunch of colorful studs on some shorts one afternoon when she was inspired). their parents would be angry with them for "ruining" their things. i want to jump for joy at her creativity and her desire for individuality!

i hope she retains that ability to just dive in immediately when she's inspired. there was a time when i did that, but these days, i spend entirely too much time thinking about creating things and far too little time actually creating them. i'm going to have to take a lesson from the child and remedy that.

magical teeny tiny mushrooms

lest you think i'm no longer capable of shallow consumerism

there's a kind of pop-up store in town. it's run by a couple of local bored housewives of wealthy husbands. they buy up a bunch of remainders and various things that apparently "fell off" a container somewhere and then open up for a week or so and sell it all out. i've actually not visited it previously, but i stopped by on a whim the other day. and amidst various nescafe coffee machines and lamps and some suspicious-looking computer equipment, they had these shoes by paris hilton. i would have bought them if i'd been able to squeeze my big fat cinderella's ugly stepsister foot into them, but alas they didn't have my size.

instead i got these. they're not paris hilton. i see that as a good thing. and better yet, they fit and make me seem very tall.

and i also got these. and for both? a mere 200 kroner (that's $36 for the currency-challenged). they look black in this shot, but they're dark blue. and surprisingly comfortable too.

i also got these, but i ordered them online, i didn't get them in the pop-up shop. i didn't know havianas made wellies, i thought they only did flipflops. aren't these the best color? they called it aubergine, but i think it's a bit more of a plum.

* * *

postmodernism is alive and kicking lady gaga.

food dilemmas

our blog camp goes to MIT course continues, this week with further readings on food paradoxes. i allowed myself to be inordinately annoyed by one of the readings - cheap meat: flap food nations in the pacific islands by deborah gewertz and frederick errington. annoyed by the insecurity of the academics writing it, insecurity that led them to constantly justify and repeat themselves throughout in a most off-putting way. perhaps i am too far from academe now to appreciate the capricious ways of gaining tenure. it mainly just made me think they were really insecure, which weakened their thesis somewhat. and it's sad because their thesis is a good one - put simply, it's that there is power and economics behind what's available on the shelves of our grocery stores. and if you're poor and powerless and live on a remote pacific island, you just might find yourself eating the fatty belly (or flap) of a sheep.

i was so irritated by the book that despite the many readings ahead, i went off-syllabus and started reading margaret visser's the rituals of dinner. this was appropriate because this past weekend, we engaged in our own yearly dinner ritual - the annual gathering we have with the swedish side of the family, to eat crayfish, sing silly drinking songs in swedish and drink too much snaps and wine and beer and catch up with everyone.

i suppose at one time, these crayfish parties came about because crayfish were in season and could be caught in the waterways of sweden. now, we get them frozen in a dilly brine from china. all we do is thaw them out, arrange them nicely on a big serving dish, throw on some fresh dill and serve with homemade bread, aioli and an assortment of beautiful savory tarts.

we wash them down with plenty of seasonal beers and snaps and wine for those of us who prefer that. we sing swedish drinking songs and toast and we talk and laugh and see members of the family that we pretty much only see on those occasions. and it's a wonderful ritual and we wouldn't miss it for the world, even if the crayfish do come from china these days. we don't even talk about that, actually. even tho' we are otherwise people who buy organic and eat in season and go in for paleo new nordic hay-infused homemade yogurt, the fact that our crayfish aren't local is a topic of which we don't speak. tho' it should be a dilemma for us, it's not. because making it so might get in the way of our yearly gathering and we love that ritual. if we couldn't have the crayfish due to the food miles or the potential pollution to which they've been exposed in their chinese homeland, we might not get together at all. because although it's not all about the crayfish, somehow it's all about the crayfish.

i can't help but feel even more strongly what i thought in the very beginning of this course, that, especially in the so-called first world, we all engage in our own brand of logic when it comes to food and our food choices. we can justify it all, or we can just ignore and choose not to more closely examine the things that don't necessarily align with the way we see ourselves.

interestingly, on the subject of those fatty belly flaps from our reading, it seems that at least here in denmark, those on the cutting edge of the culinary world (e.g. noma and the new nordic food folks) are making those cheaper, fattier cuts of meat trendy - you can order pork belly in fine restaurants these days, so these things change just like spring and winter fashions. and once the flaps have gone upscale, what cut of meat will be left for the pacific islanders? and what about the chinese who would like to eat their own crayfish?

there are so many food-related dilemmas, it could almost put a girl off eating. naah...

* * *

if you'd like to check out what the others in our virtual course are thinking about these issues, go to the flipboard magazine i've created - it's called food & culture, i've flipped all of our blog posts into one iPad-friendly flippable magazine for your reading pleasure.

stormy moods make for stormy weather

it's been a changeable week weather-wise. one of those weeks where i feel like i'm causing the weather with my moods...sunny, bright and glorious one moment, blustery and spitting the next, pretty much precisely how i've felt. of course there is a chance it's the other way around and the weather contributes to my mood and not vice versa.

despite the wonderful news on monday evening and the soul-nourishing event tuesday night, the rest of the week has been a series of petty irritations. an unnecessarily snotty mother at the stable. the fiasco that sabin's trip to st. petersburg is shaping up to be. political agendas. a strange woman who asked me to move my car from "her" parking spot in a public parking lot, where spots don't belong to anyone in particular. a dull, all day headache that prevented meaningful work or thought.

small irritations, but irritating nonetheless, especially when all lumped together. especially because they chip away at the good energy that came with events of the early part of the week. each taking a little bit of it away, until it feels like there's not enough left and you need to find a way to tank up again, but you can't because of that infernal dull headache.

maybe it's all just PMS, or rather DMS, since i think it's actually worst during, not before. but i realize that's too much information. i only talk about it because it really is a factor. moods are not something static or even or stable. they go up and down and you're in high spirits one minute and down in the dumps the next. just like our changeable weather - sunny one minute and raining the next. the good bit is that's the only way to get rainbows.

but a walk in the garden, photographing the autumn fruits on a beautiful morning before the rain comes, really does help. especially if accompanied by gathering a big batch of fruit, throwing it in the steamer to make juice and having the smells of warm raspberries and warm elderberries fill the house. it may not make the headache go away, but it helps.

happy weekend, one and all.

* * *

pet words.  

my conscious ones (at the moment) are: topography, synesthetic, troglodyte, xenophobic.

i wish they were: transcendent, elated, vast, encompassing.

in reality they are: actually, supposedly, apparently.

what are yours?

* * *

and speaking of words:
creative swear words.
made up words.

a flock of amateurs

we have signed the child up for a trip to st. petersburg with something called the ungdomsskole (youth school?), it's a public institution that's associated with the regular schools and they run a whole bunch of different after school activities and trips for kids from 7th to 9th grade. this is the first time they've planned a trip to st. petersburg and believe me, it shows. it seems that those organizing the trip haven't got the first clue about what it takes as far as visas and advising which clothes to take and how much money to take (they advised that the 12-13 year olds have a good selection of credit cards with them). and tho' i'm normally a very laid back traveler, this time it's driving me absolutely mad (both in the sense of crazy and of angry).

they even changed the dates of the trip slightly, but haven't published that anywhere - their website still has the old dates. they claimed to have sent the children who are signed up a text with the new dates, but both my child and her friend, who is also going, have received no such text. they guy in charge continues to insist they did. such a stupid lie is unnecessary. just admit you're a bit disorganized and didn't get it sent. don't keep lying about it when we can see the proof right there in two telephones. what's really stupid about it is that we need those correct dates for the visa application.

in order to get the visa, you have to have an invitation letter from someone in russia. in this case, the hotel where they will stay. only then can you fill out the application and apply for the visa. oh, and you must deliver the visa application to the embassy in person, you can't send it in. the embassy won't really say exactly how long the visa takes - if you pay extra, you can have it in 4 days, but it's likely to take anywhere from 7 - 14 days to get it if you don't pay extra. since they are set to leave october 15, time is ticking away. do you think we've seen the invitation letter from the hotel? no we have not.

do you think we've gotten a convoluted mail with some instructions about health insurance cut & pasted into it from the russian embassy website? yes, we have. is that the most important thing? no it is not. do you think this is causing me to pull out my hair? well, you would be right about that.

they held a meeting for the parents and the kids who are going on the trip on tuesday evening. i couldn't go, as i went to the salon allison park evening. but husband and sabin went. they met the three adults who are going on the trip - one is a bossy belorussian, one is a russian from st. petersburg who doesn't share a common language with the rest of the people going on the trip and one is a danish guy who was apparently heavily bullied by the belorussian throughout the course of the meeting. they showed some kind of only moderately informative power point with some pictures of what they would see and talked extensively about which credit cards the children should bring. they may have had some advice about what clothes to pack, but husband didn't write that down. he did, however, write down the following:

they will see:
* 4 shoe stores
* 6 candy stores
* 1 newspaper kiosk

they will spend 3 days in their hotel room.

nothing about culture was mentioned.

they are responsible for buying their own lunch, tho' breakfast and dinner are included.

this does not help me keep my hair. tho' i'm pretty sure most of it is a joke (except that thing about the lunch). he also drew a strange little picture of what appears to be a llama peeing. but i'm not sure what that has to do with the trip.

at this point, i actually have my doubts as to whether the trip is even going to happen. i want it to happen. i love the idea of my 12-year-old seeing the hermitage and the winter palace and the peter & paul fortress. i want her to walk the streets of st. petersburg and soak in the onion domes and see the canal where rasputin's body was found and feel the history that is lurking in every corner. all of this even tho' i am a moscow person. that flock of amateurs had just better get their act together and make this happen. a flock of amateurs, that's one of those danish phrases that maybe does translate.