the beginning of a new photo obsession

i asked my friend bill to give me some photo assignments to do to get me through this interminable wait. we've had some very grey, dark days and i haven't really felt too inspired, but today, i decided that despite the grey fogginess of the day, i'd tackle one of them. the assignment was: reflections. the indirect reflection of someone or some thing. the actual person or thing can't be in the pic.

this fits very well with the theme of our local creative group's spring exhibition, so i cleaned up an old ikea mirror that we had hanging in our bathroom at the old house and i went outside. here are the results:

and one of myself, because i couldn't resist.

i liked the assignment. i'm less fond of the fir tree than i expected to be - the fine, black, bare branches against the grey sky just work better. i like the brightness of the mirror, tho' i'd like to have had some cool gold-framed oval-shaped one. there's something about the blue and green mosaic mirrored edge and the way it blurred out with my 50mm fixed lens that i just like. it gives a life and color to the photo that would have been absent. i spotted another location when i picked up sabin from school and i suspect i'll be loading that mirror into the car and carrying it around with me. that won't look way sillier than lying on the ground, photographing minifigures, now will it?

while i am waiting...

waiting is seriously underestimated as a device of torture. they should use it on those guys at guantanamo, i swear they would crack and tell them whatever they wanted to hear within a month. while i'm eternally waiting, i thought i'd dig out some bright colors from my fabric stash and make a quilt. i always instinctively turn to anna maria horner's bright, cheerful patterns. they just brighten up these grey, february days. and there's something to sitting down with fabric and the sewing machine and making something tangible that you can have in your hands, or your lap, as it were, when you're finished. i chose a simple triangle square pattern. i hadn't tried it before and it seemed like it would sew up quickly and not tax my brain too much. because that's the other thing that waiting does to you. it rather heavily taxes your brain and renders you not very clear in your thinking. and moody. moody as all hell.  just ask my family. at least they'll soon have the comfort of a quilt to console them. or to hide under when the waiting storm cloud that is me blows through. stringing people along like this is just not right. but at least something bright and cheerful might come out of it.

i certainly hope this wait is worth it.

* * *

did you see that president obama made a buzzfeed video?
how awesome is that?

* * *

nice piece in the new yorker on jony ive and what's ahead for apple.

* * *

also in this week's new yorker, a new murakami short story.

* * *

and one more from the new yorker.
an interview with flemming rose, the editor who originally printed the muhammed drawings
that may have sparked the chain of events culminating in copenhagen last saturday.

* * *

dang, it is a good week for the new yorker.

in the same boat

still trying to absorb what happened last evening in copenhagen and like with the charlie hebdo events a few weeks ago, i find it too easy that the supposed perpetrator is killed before making him explain. now we will assign whatever meaning we wish to it - fear, terror, suspicion - and it will only continue in the long run. us against them will solidify rather than dissolving.

i have this notion that instead of being afraid, we need to hold more events where we discuss free speech, we need to have so many of them that no disgruntled, disenfranchised person with skewed ideas can possibly attack them all. we need to overwhelm them with the freedom of our speech.

shaken.

someone with murderous intentions has attacked a free speech event in copenhagen which featured a swedish cartoonist who published islam-critical cartoons back in 2007. it's happening again. probably (tho' we don't really know that for sure, since photos of the perpetrator are very sketchy at best, as are descriptions). one of the people in denmark who means the most to me is a cartoonist. he wasn't involved in the jyllands posten drawings back in 2005 (he works for a competing newspaper), but he is equally sharp in his editorial cartooning skills. and it shakes me to the core to think that i have to worry about his safety as he goes about his everyday life here in denmark. but it probably really has come to that after charlie hebdo and now this attack in copenhagen. is it really possible now that people will die for free speech and being clever and skeptical? and is it worth it? at this moment, even in the face of the uncertainty over what has really happened in copenhagen earlier today (and we don't really have a clear picture of it yet as i write this), that might very well be the case. keep your loved ones close and tell them that you love them.

happy anniversary to us!

husband actually looked much happier than this minifig 16 years ago when we walked over to bronshøj kirke hand in hand and got married. then we had a bit of champagne with his fancy uniform-clad colleagues and headed off to london for a weekend mini honeymoon. i think the minifig husband is a bit sad because today he also turned 50 and that's a bit of a tough one. not that i would know. yet.

we gave husband a pair of waders for his birthday. it's what he wanted. he also wanted burgers for dinner. homemade ones. with plenty of guacamole and bacon. and port. that man loves port. we'll have a big party to celebrate this milestone in the summer when the weather is good. garden parties are always the best.

a thousand and one memories

continuing on my niche perfume mania, i blindly ordered a couple of interesting-sounding scents from black phoenix alchemy lab. their scents are oils and very reasonably-priced, so you can definitely chance it and just order up a couple that sound good without breaking the bank. so i ordered kit (it had me at "pen ink") and café mille et une nuits. there are many other promising-sounding scents on the site and they were kind enough to send four samples with my order, so i will likely be going back.

when i put on café mille et une nuits, i was slightly put off by a sweetish, candy scent, but it soon dissipated and settled into a smoky, retro scent that transported me to the afternoons i spent studying at great midwestern in iowa city in the late 80s. like an underlying sweet waffle cone layered with smoky patchouli and freshly-ground coffee that brought to mind images of shopping the secondhand racks at ragstock and wandering into the soap opera for some bath goodies. i was reminded once again how scent is inextricably tied to memory and just a faint hint of an old familiar scent can cause a tidal wave of memories to wash over you. i've been so taken with it, that i haven't even tried kit yet.

have you ever been transported by a scent? tell me your story in the comments below!

reading and listening and strangers and historical perspective

i just finished the last book of ken follett's century trilogy. i know they were novels, but as historical fiction, i feel like they gave me a more personal take on the sweeping history of the 20th century and a greater understanding of things like the cuban missile crisis and the fall of the berlin wall. literature can do that, as can 20+ years to reflect on the events. it struck me that it's very hard to know the meaning of things immediately after they happen. or even a decade after. i think we are definitely still struggling to make sense of september 11, 2001. and i think our round-the-clock style of news doesn't do us any favors. the nature of today's media means that analysis must begin immediately, before we even really know what's happening and i think it's diminishing the human race. we can't possibly know the meaning of things without reflecting on them. but that certainly doesn't stop the relentless talking heads on television. makes me glad i pretty much only watch netflix and hbo nordic these days (plus my guilty pleasure of a few programs on tlc).

i've also been listening to as many of the strangers podcasts as are available on iTunes. they are filled with stories that make me long for more stories. stories of people who were strangers to one another, strangers to themselves, and then strangers no more. since the host is danish and refers to that fact quite often, i feel a strange connection with her that makes me wonder if it borders on stalkerish. she's been in my country a little bit longer than i've been in hers and she is at times as bewildered by the US as i am by denmark. she seems like someone i'd love to invite over to dinner.

this listening, coupled with reading the edge of eternity got me thinking about marina ivanovna, the very soviet-style russian teacher i had at iowa back in the early 90s. she struck fear in our hearts - using public humiliation as her main motivator. that works for me, i must admit, so despite how tough she was, i quite liked her. she lived in russian house, a big old house on a tree-lined iowa city street where a bunch of russian majors lived - kind of a sorority/fraternity house for slavic geeks. and i wonder what she made of it all? so weird that i never wondered that at the time - i thought of her as a teacher, not as a person. i think we all did with teachers at some point in our lives - being surprised at seeing them outside of school with their families or just mowing their lawn or something entirely normal. it seemed so strange that they were just ordinary people, living ordinary lives.

but here was marina ivanovna, a professor from moscow university who must have lived her entire life under the soviet system, plopped down in iowa city, just as the soviet union was dissolving. it must have been so bewildering and overwhelming in many ways - the nature of the students, the abundance of consumer goods, the informality of it all. i wonder what she made of it and whether she had aching moments of homesickness or whether she felt so fortunate to be there. what did she think? did she find it all so strange? was she happy or frustrated or overwhelmed or puzzled? she was probably all of those things at different moments, just like i am here in denmark, even after all of these years.

we can all feel like strangers at times, even when we live in our own cultures, but it is magnified when we live abroad. i guess all we can do is keep telling stories to try to make sense of it all, and remember to be patient, because it may take the vantage point of years before it does indeed begin to make sense.